PSA: Use Your Bookmarks as a Search Engine

[Note: this is by no means a new idea: I learned it from Rohan Subramani.]

TLDR:

1. For any website I use somewhat frequently, I press Ctrl+D two times while on the website.
2. I name the bookmark something unique and descriptive.
3. I place the bookmark in my “just to bookmark” folder.
4. When I want to access the bookmark, I press “*” and then search for it by name. (See the appendix for Chrome instructions).
5. When I see my preferred site, I press the down arrow and then enter to navigate to my site.

The Challenge

There are a couple of sites I visit every day: Gmail, DuckDuckGo, Claude. To access these sites easy, browsers have a pretty good system: they learn the most common URL starting with a letter (or combinations of letters) and suggest a completion. I press “m” and they'll suggests “mail.google.com.” (or mozilla.org in the blank browser below).¹

Like many, I also have websites which I visit infrequently, but which are useful to have quick access to: GitHub repositories, a Google doc, online banking.

To find these sites easier, you can use bookmarks: click the little star and name the site as necessary:

Then, just click on the toolbar:

But this could be better.

Two observations:
1. This method requires a lot of organization and upkeep. You have to manually click the button, and then decide which folder to place the bookmark in. If you don’t organize your bookmarks, they are hard to navigate.
2. This isn’t very keyboard friendly.

A better approach: using your address bar

Modern browsers support "site search". That is, if you start your search with a specific string (like “@w” for Wikipedia), it will only search that website. (This is a bit like DuckDuckGo’s bang searches, but built into the browser.)²

One particularly useful class of searches are browser functions. For Firefox and Edge³, you can use

• “%” to search your currently open tabs. (Good for the types with 2000 open tabs).
• “^” to search your history.
• “*” to search your bookmarks.

Even nicer, “*” searches by the name of your bookmark, which you can easily customize. Above, I named my sample bookmark "Correspondence Texting Blog Post". To access the post, I can press the down arrow and then "Enter." Easy!

Adding New Bookmarks Easily

You can still use the little star icon, but I prefer to press Ctrl+D twice. The first time bookmarks the tab, while the second time allows me to customize the name.

To keep this as low friction as possible, I put most of my bookmarks in a “Just to bookmark” folder, while I organize important bookmarks as relevant.⁴

Appendix: Configuring Chrome

For Chrome, the default prefix to search your bookmarks is @bookmarks.

However, if you press the "Add" button, you can add "*" as a new search engine to get the desired behavior.

Bonus Appendix: Storing Pieces of Information as Bookmarks

A while back, I wrote about making a browser extension to track small pieces of information in the browser: WebInfoKeeper. It turns out that you can do something similar with bookmarks.

If you write data:text/plain;charset=utf-8,<your-text>, anything after the comma will be rendered:

This means you can store any string you want, and just name it descriptively as a bookmark.

For bonus points, bookmark data:text/plain;charset=utf-8, (the comma is important) and give it an alias to make it easier to add these pieces of data! To do so:

1. Open a new tab
2. Right click on the bookmarks toolbar
3. Click "add bookmark"
4. Put "data:text/plain;charset=utf-8," as the url
5. Put "`" (or whatever you want) as the alias.

Then, to save a new string: a) navigate to the bookmark using the alias b) press Ctrl+L to navigate to the search bar c) add your string and then d) bookmark the url. Easy as that!⁵

Notes: