On launch this was one of our banner features in Chrome -- full text search over your browsing history. I wrote some of the code. I believe we (Google's Chrome team) implemented (and contributed back) SQLite's full text search support exactly to make this feature.

I don't know why it was removed (after my time) but I do know it had a lot of problems.

1) Most users were unaware of the feature, and it's hard to find a way for them to discover it.

2) The index costs a lot of disk space, which makes #1 worse. There's a whole bunch of tradeoffs around how much storage to use vs how much history to keep. Pages that self-reload can cause the index to bloat endlessly (a real bug we had).

3) Having an index of pages locally is not sufficient to make a useful search engine. There's a lot of ranking involved in making google search good. Similarly we tried to show "snippets" of page text that showed why we showed the results we did and that itself requires a lot of effort to be useful.

#2 and #3 are just bugs that can be fixed with more effort, but it's hard to motivate that effort in the presence of #1.

(FWIW, the sibling comment about how it was removed to favor google.com searches isn't plausible to me, that's not how the Chrome team works.)

I'd be happy if it did it just for bookmarked pages. I have often wanted that in bookmark search and it could be incorporated directly into the bookmark searchbar.

Me too! In fact, when I think about it, bookmarks are such a nebulous thing. It's like I want them to do two diametrically opposed jobs.

On the one hand, when I have a bookmark for a site like HN, I want it to give me a quick way to get to the front page and see the latest posts so I can read and discuss them. In this case, the bookmark is serving like a pointer to an address whose contents are subject to change.

On the other hand, I bookmark pages with specific information I want to keep so I can refer back to it later. This is where bookmarks often fail me. Websites are transient by nature and bookmarks are extremely vulnerable to link rot. What I think I'd really want is a bookmark that saves an archive of the page so that I'll always have access to the information in its original form, even if the page changes or the site goes down. In this case, the bookmark is functioning more like a constant than a variable.

I'm aware that browsers such as Safari have the ability to save a page as a web archive file which includes all the data needed to render the page in its original form. The problem is that this feature completely punts on the issue of managing a set of these web archives, delegating that task to the Finder. I want a UI that is more integrated into the browser. If I bookmark a site it should save and manage the archive automatically. Full text search on all my bookmark archived pages should be built into the address bar. Perhaps in order to avoid the conflict between the two uses of bookmarks described above there could be a difference between favourites and bookmarks.

I don't know, does anyone else have any thoughts about this stuff?

Oli here from the team developing Memex.

thanks for speaking my mind here :)

We built Memex for that combination of use cases in mind. So right now you can already full-text search your bookmarks, and filter by time, domain and tags. Already on the mid-term roadmap we plan to enable full-html/text snapshots of visited pages, both locally and on-demand. For the latter we are potentially working with the Internet Archive.

Agree with #3, I built a similar tool with Rails/Elastic search/React couple of years back. It never returned the most relevant results on top. Realized Elastic search can only do that if I could add back-links for ranking and for adding back-links (I could be wrong) I would have to crawl the entire internet.

Chrome does this deliberately because they want you to do another google search instead of looking at your history.

One of the other responses here was from a (former?) chrome dev and they said the feature was implemented, had a lot of issues that could be eventually fixed but cost too much dev time to be worthwhile, and nobody used the feature anyways. While the dev said he didn't know why it got dropped, it was likely the lack of use and excess cost.

Wow, that is eye-opening to me!

Citation?

Well just try it yourself, it’s really that simple.

On the other hand, Chromium (the open-source version of Chrome) does this too so maybe it’s simply a UX decision rather than an evil plot to send more data to Google, though I personally believe that it’s the latter…

Sadly, even in Firefox now there seems to be no way to make the address bar never do a search :(.

Well if you make DuckDuckGo your standard search engine you only get search term suggestion without actually executing the search if you don't choose one of the terms or hit enter with a non-url in the bar - not sure if there is anything negative about this feature

I already have it set to not show any search suggestions since if I wanted that I would use the search box. I want it to not send the data anywhere if I hit enter (by accident, because I pasted what I thought was going to be a domain name but turned out to be something else) and it isn't a possible domain name or ip address. Not super high impact (accidently pasting a password I assume would generate a DNS lookup anyway) but it fells like a completely gratutious invasion of privacy when I have already indicated in multiple ways that I do not want to search from the address bar.

After searching my history for years using the awesomebar, I am pretty confident Firefox also keeps track of the queries themselves, and the choice you make in relation to the query.

Say there's two websites I visit regularly with similar names? If I usually load one after typing three characters, but load the other one after typing four characters, Firefox will present the former first in the first case, and the latter first in the second case.

Firefox does indeed keep track of the queries. They're located in the places.sqlite file in your profile folder, in the table moz_inputhistory.

In Chrome if you open the history and hit "show full history," you get a search bar that works better for history.

But you can’t search inside the content. It just searches the titles.

Does Firefox search IN the content of the pages you visited?

Almost can't imagine and in my test just now, that did not work.

Where's "show full history"? I don't see anything resembling that, nor any obscure dropdowns or popouts that might be hiding it.

The "show full history" menu option in History menu they mentioned is Mac only. On Windows, you can see the "show full history" option by holding the Go Back button at top left (hover your mouse on it you'll see a tooltip suggesting this).

The sad part is, that option just opens the built-in History page, just like pressing Ctrl + H, which I believe that's not what we wanted at all.

I think Chrome just redefined "full" while it regularly deletes history entries older than three months.

Ah, right, Linux has "show full history" in the Back button menu (which can also be opened by right-clicking).

And yeah, ^H isn't fun(/useful).

⌘+Y On the mac. It's the bottom option in the history menu.

The one thing I do miss in Firefox, though, is the chronological listing. I find my memory of the rough time, and sequence of events leading to an item, is usually stronger than my memory of the specific content.

If you press "view" on the top right of the history sidebar, and select "by last visited," it'll be in chronological order.

Good tip, but I still cannot search for a page to get to that timestamp and then scroll up/down in time to find something.

Hey, thanks for that! Might not be quite at Chrome's level, but a heck of an improvement over the grouped version.

No matter what firefox does well, it isn't going to keep converts as long as their default background is so blindingly white.

I still don't understand why firefox refuses to slightly gray out their background by default. Chrome puts less strain on my eyes and that's far more important than anything firefox does well.

Every time I try to stick with firefox, my eyes get strained and eventually I go back to chrome.