I have yet to find a solution for this.
One solution is I screenshot all the sites i visit, extract their colors, and create a searchable index. Nice side project idea I guess.
Sue Dumais from Microsoft Research and her team wrote a seminal paper on this entitled "Stuff I've Seen".
It is surprising that modern browsers innovate so little - for example they do not have a mode that searches only URLs you have previously visited, which would obviously massively help with known item search.
What's worse, they don't have a useful list of those URLs anyway[0], not anymore - both Chrome and Firefox have some ridiculously short and (AFAIK) not configurable window of browsing history. At this point they could do away with the history tab completely, as it's perfectly calibrated to be useless: the links are dropped just as they cross the threshold between "likely still have it open in a tab" and "what was that thing I saw the other day?".
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[0] - Locally. I'm sure Google has it on their servers, but it's meant to help advertisers, not users.
I so badly want an extension to store all my phone and computer browser history, just URLs and Page Titles for all time so I can search it. How does this not exist? Much less be built in... Page text would be even better, but all I know that have attempted this have failed.
Allows you to search your history or bookmarks by page content, not just title.
The problem is with when it doesn't work: when it's the least convenient and the most irritating. For popular content it doesn't matter if you forget a precise word used there, you'll get to it soon enough. But for specific, niche content - which is the most valuable to me most of the time - even if you get all the keywords right you might not find what you're looking for on Google. The reasons range from the keywords being too generic to the site being no longer online and it's really frustrating when it happens.
OneTab and bookmarks are not an answer because they don't save the content. I tried Joplin + Web Clipper which does, but it works on a single-tab basis, and when I have 200 tabs open sending them all to Joplin manually takes ages... and then Joplin slows down to a crawl when you're done.
Reminds me though I have also experienced “I swear there is a word that sounds like “bla” that means xyz” and spend 30+ min trying to find it in dictionaries and it just doesn’t exist. Funny how the mind works.
This doesn't always work though and can lead to a frustrating half hour of searching that ends in disappointment.