Classic bookmarks failed for the same reason manually curated directories lost to search engines - because the mnemonic organization doesn't work well at the required scale. Firefox has tags though, and is generally good at the classic bookmark management. You can use it to bookmark a couple hundred sites without getting lost (more or less), especially with extensions.

But what you really need is a google-like, or even better, LLM-powered search for the locally cached text of the pages you bookmark. README for this software mentions fuzzy search, not sure if it's capable enough.

> Classic bookmarks failed for the same reason manually curated directories lost to search engines - because the mnemonic organization doesn't work well at the required scale.

That's exactly it for me. Once I get a few bookmarks in the list, I'll inevitably need to organize them, but then I'll find I don't want to take the time to do that, so I just don't bother saving the bookmark.

At the end of the day, I just want to dump all my links somewhere and be able to find them again. I don't want to think about where they should go.

I built a journaling app recently [1] (the UI is similar to twitter, but for your personal thoughts), and what I've ended up doing a lot is dumping links in there. What I've found that helps is writing a quick note and adding tags, but even more than that, having a link preview generated makes it easier to remember what the link was later. (Based on screenshots, it looks like Grimoire is also generating a link preview.)

The fact that the journal UI is a "feed" also means I can browse through my history and see when I saved the link, so it has a chronological aspect to it as well. I think having all these affordances for finding things (commentary text, tags, link preview, chronology) is way more useful than hierarchical management.

[1] https://minders.ussherpress.com/

> At the end of the day, I just want to dump all my links somewhere and be able to find them again. I don't want to think about where they should go.

You might want to check out xBrowserSync. Its open source, can be self-hosted, has browser extensions and an Android app.

You don't have to organize anything. When you add bookmarks, you add them with tags and they will all go into the default bookmark folder. The beauty is that you never have to interact with that folder. Instead you use the browser extension to search for tags, name, and description. Its a very simple app that does 1 thing well.

The UI does look a little dated, but there's so little of it that it doesn't matter much.

I am doing something similar, but far simpler: I have a chat with myself in Telegram, that I can access on all my devices (Telegram has a desktop app). If I want to remember something, I just write a message to myself with the link and some keywords. Telegram search is good enough to find most stuff easily. You could also add tags with a #, but I don't even bother.

Love this concept, and the implementation looks nice and simple. Nice job.

That is exactly right.

That is why I included search on my bookmark manager. I use it daily. It contains search.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

For what it's worth, I gave up on all external bookmark tools and went back to using Firefox's built-in bookmark manager. I enjoy that it's a CTRL+B away to see all my bookmarks, and that I'm able to sync it with my Firefox account.

That's strange. I use Firefox bookmarks pretty heavily and haven't had any of these problems. I type any bit of a URL or title for any bookmark I have in any folder, and Firefox finds it instantly every time. I think I have more than 1,000 at work (internal wikis, blahblah). A large part of my never switching to Chrome came from how much better Firefox worked for bookmarks. I use tags and ability to show tagged bookmarks from the URL bar a lot, especially. (i.e., "tag +" will show all of the bookmarks with that tag, but actually, you don't have to type the '+' unless you want to exclude matching the substring for anything but tags, because it searches tags when you start typing it also)

Agree with sibling, works on my machine, I have over 2k bookmarks in FF. Make a new profile and reimport the bookmarks and see if this all still happens.

That said, all you have is the url and description if you don't tag, so yeah, it's hard for it to be really smart about what you are looking for. As another commenter mentioned, this is an area that an AI assist tagger or search would be useful. But the industry want to drive you to a search engine so you can be data mined and shown ads.

I know I compute like a caveman at times, so a few points that might sound downright archaic:

* If I have over 1k bookmarks, that probably means it's time to go in for spring cleaning and start deleting some

* Other comments have made it apparent that you can tag bookmarks, but I personally just prepend the names of bookmarks like "javascript js - How to reverse a singly linked list GeekForGeeks" to make it easier for me to search for it in the future.

In the end, I prefer the benefit of not having an extra site/tool like Instapaper/Pocket/Shiori to have to deal with.

because it's contrary to their business model? Google wants you to search for all your queries, so it knows in real time what matters to you

I don’t think that argument makes any sense. Do people who use external bookmark managers suddenly stop using search? Also, this isn’t just about Chrome.

For many people, Google is sort of their bookmark manager.

Want to open Facebook? Search 'Facebook' and click on the link.

Want to open your bank site ? Again google bank name and click on the link.

I've see even tech people do this. The only bookmarks I've seen my colleagues use are for internal reference wikis and links which are not readily searchable.

I don't know whether this is a search or UX or people problem but the whole workflow can be improved for sure.

Browser opened to Bing? Type "Google", then type "Facebook" then click on the link. Nevermind that typing "F"+enter in the addressbar would have worked.

It's UX, but Google and Bing want it this way, so...

I've found I manually type out certain subsets of URLs where possible[0], maybe that's subconsciously associated with my impression that Google Search results have gotten worse and worse over the years.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/<term> and https://docs.rs/<lib> come to mind.

> I've found I manually type out certain subsets of URLs where possible

If you are doing this often enough, may be adding a custom keyword search might help. Both chrome and Firefox support it. Very useful with random JIRA and other ticket/id type navigation to skip search and jump directly to their pages.

> maybe that's subconsciously associated with my impression that Google Search results have gotten worse and worse over the years.

It has gotten worse and I don't think even Google will contest that claim.

I don't think the point is they will stop searching.

But they will search less. Which, as we have seen in the recent Google anti-trust case, is also a point Google looks at intensively when they introduce new features.

I think the idea is they don't want people to use bookmarks at all and just search every time

and Google can remember which results you want when typing keywords to url column.

it almost work like I can access all things I need by "search" with Google...until I found Google does not remember anything after two year.

My bookmarks are all well ordered, it’s just a matter of putting them in order. For documentation I even indent them like this:

  Docs (folder, expanded)
  Node
    FS
    Path
  SQLite
    Database
    Statement
    Syntax
  …

When I add a bookmark, I always select or create a folder for it. I also clear any marketing bs from the title. I believe no tech can organize bookmarks in a useful way if you don’t want to. Although I have some ideas, I bet that no fancy bookmark manager ever thought of implementing them.

Metadata has been a thing for how long now

It would be naive to assume that it will contain a systematized coherent description of a page content.

I mean, it depends on the features. Browsers have bookmarks, basic bookmarks.

Now there are bookmark tools which are archiving a page for example, have full text search. And you can add more and more features, it’s an endless game - that’s why we have that many bookmarking tools. Everybody has different priorities and needs different things.

Why wouldn't they? What other areas of UI do browsers excel at?

Chrome doesn't want you to use anything other than Google to mediate web access. Makes business sense for a search company to build a browser that is basically just a search bar.

Other browsers copied their homework. Makes less sense.