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Is there a browser that supports searching through the full text of the history pages' content ? Chrome and Firefox supports only searching the titles and URLs (with their omnibars).

I'm aware that Google Desktop and the likes are capable of doing that, but if the browser omnibar (or awesomebar or whateverbar) could do that - it'd be much more convenient.

7 Answers 7

7

Chrome does this if you go to the History view and enter a query in the search box there.

Open the History view with Ctrl+H or by selecting it from the Spanner (Wrench) menu.

Chrome Screenshot

7
  • Would have been surprising if Chrome wasn't able to search like that.
    – random
    Sep 17, 2009 at 8:06
  • But it seems to have the drawback it won't search (or cache, I guess) ssl pages, which is an increasing fraction of the web.
    – poolie
    Jul 13, 2012 at 19:01
  • I was actually surprised to learn that Chrome supported this feature by default - are no 3rd-party tools needed for searching the full text of a user's web history? Jul 27, 2012 at 2:56
  • @AndersonGreen - no extra tools. Chrome will search your history like this out of the box.
    – David Webb
    Jul 30, 2012 at 13:31
  • 12
    Surprise! Chrome no longer does. Intentionally. And current versions of Opera no longer do, either. Nov 24, 2013 at 10:55
6

Falcon

Since WorldBrain's Memex recently deprecated this feature, I went looking and discovered Falcon. Turns out, WorldBrain was a fork of Falcon anyway, according to the author.

To use, enter f + spacebar + your search terms in the browser address bar.

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  • How to get more than seven results?
    – High GPA
    Jan 8, 2021 at 2:32
5

This feature can be found in Opera. You can search your browser history and pull up relevant pages that contain that phrase on the page itself and not constrained to just the title of the page alone.

opera search results

4

Try WorldBrain.io

You can try out the free WorldBrain chrome extension. It lets you full-text search all the pages & PDFs you visited and bookmarked.

Downloadable here: www.worldbrain.io

Note: I am the founder of this project.

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  • I like the ability to import bookmarks and previous history. Gives me a running start on full text search.
    – Sun
    May 17, 2017 at 16:49
  • This stops working too, sadly.
    – High GPA
    Jan 8, 2021 at 2:17
3

Try fetching.io

Complete, fulltext history search - indexes all pages browsed.

Index stored locally (only available on Mac - Linux coming soon) or cloud-based.

Free while in beta (at least as of 12 Nov 2014).


Enable this search from omnibox by typing f, space and then your search.

Like:

f bottlenose dolphin
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  • fetching.io is great if I do say so myself! Dec 15, 2014 at 22:04
  • lol feel like I'm playing pong and just had a celeb shot for the winner haha
    – Deryck
    Dec 18, 2014 at 4:04
  • Looks like a paid product as of May 2017.
    – Sun
    May 17, 2017 at 16:42
3

Since Chrome & Opera both discontinued support for full-text search, here is a current extension that I found:

All Seeing Eye Chrome extension

All Seeing Eye stores your history on your local machine, instead of in the "cloud", for greater privacy/security. And it can be used in Opera with the Download Chrome extension for Opera which lets you use extensions from the Chrome Store.

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I'm assuming you're not on macOS, but just for reference for those that are on macOS and want to compare browsers:

Safari does this natively. Just enter a search term in the history text box:

enter image description here

... and it'll search the content of the document in addition to the title and url of the site.

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  • This is another reason I want to use Safari but it is missing so many useful extensions! Can's wait when they let devs port chrome extensions to Safari.
    – ruslaniv
    Jul 4, 2020 at 7:54

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