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I'm not trying to search for a bookmark - I'm trying to search for a term that may appear on one of my bookmarked sites.

For instance, if I wanted to search on the term "Obama" and restrict my query to the New York Times web site, I know I could type this into the main URL/Search bar in Chrome:

obama site:nytimes.com

I'm wondering if there's a way to change that so that it's effectively:

obama site:any one of the sites in my Chrome bookmark folder

Thanks in advance for your help!

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  • 2
    Sounds like a good idea for an extension.
    – squillman
    Jan 11, 2010 at 20:13
  • 1
    Truly! I've never written a Google extension but this might push me over the edge. Unfortunately right now I'm slammed with client work (which is why I was looking for this time-saver in the first place, ha!).
    – Michelle
    Jan 13, 2010 at 17:07
  • Not specifically what you want, but opera can search cached pages for content through the history tool. If you've visited the page recently, you should be able to search it.
    – Fake Name
    Aug 7, 2010 at 9:44
  • The question is a bit ambiguous: are you saying that you want to search all pages that are on a host that appears in your bookmarks list?
    – intuited
    Aug 7, 2010 at 22:27
  • Not an answer, but Firefox's add-on "Bookmark Tools" does what you want.
    – harrymc
    Aug 8, 2010 at 10:49

10 Answers 10

12

I just released a Google Chrome extension called SearchMark that will do exactly what you want. Hope you find it useful.

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  • Hooray!!! A free solution. I've installed and tried it out, and it works okay. I'd really like if it performed searches more traditionally, though. For instance if I search on the quoted words "control panel" it brings back results for "control" and "panel" - not the two together. BUT, hey, at least it's free and doens't require me signing up for another service. Thanks for sharing!
    – Michelle
    Oct 15, 2010 at 15:37
  • I am working on this. The next version should have that feature.
    – Akshay
    Dec 15, 2010 at 19:08
  • 1
    It crashes in Chromium 11.0.696.65 (84435) Ubuntu 10.04
    – jbeard4
    May 9, 2011 at 15:00
  • I have been searching for such a tool for YEARS!
    – Ayyash
    Oct 7, 2015 at 4:49
  • 1
    The tool was abandoed in 2011 and does not work in modern chrome due to inline js code security restrictions. I made a fork with the fixes, you are welcome.
    – Klesun
    Oct 27, 2018 at 2:17
6

You may use the browser-based Historio.us.

This is what makeuseof.com says in Historious Takes Bookmarks To The Next Level:

The idea behind Historious is simple. Instead of storing bookmarks in folders, they’re all individually indexed; just like Google does with the whole of the internet, to create your personalized search world. This search engine, which can be used in every browser, across computers, allows you to search both by title and content of the indexed pages.

Historious works across browsers by bookmarklet. A bookmarklet is a (regular) bookmark that executes a bit of Javascript code. You’ll be able to add it to your bookmarks bar after you’ve completed (free) registration. Alternatively, there’s also a Google Chrome extension. This works exactly the same as the bookmarklet, and nothing keeps you from using the extension on one computer and the bookmarklet on another.

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3

It seems Google has a custom search you can point to your bookmarks file. From their doc, "Here's a quick and easy way to create a search engine from the links on your web page": http://www.google.com/cse/tools/create_onthefly

The way I use it, I have to export my bookmarks from xbel to an .html file, but that's a useful thing to have anyway. (Especially since I haven't found a Chrome equivalent to Galeon's "My Portal").

3

Ctrl+Shift+O opens the Bookmark Manager page There's a Search bar/box in the top left corner that allows your to search through your bookmarks

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  • 1
    I'd like to search through the sites that are bookmarked, not just the bookmarks themselves which is what that search does. thanks tho!
    – Michelle
    Oct 3, 2013 at 16:13
2

If you don't find/write a Chrome extension to do this, you could

A) get a list of your bookmark URLs

I initially thought that the Bookmarks file in the chrome profile directory was an sqlite3 DB like some of the other files in there. This is incorrect. It looks like a JSON file, so what you'll probably want to do is to import it into some scripting language that has JSON facilities (pretty much anything beginning with 'p' is a safe bet, or even JS if you want to use rhino/spidermonkey/etc) and then extract certain elements.

At first glance, it looks like you'll want the url property of each object that has a 'type' property equal to "url". There are some complications though: for example, this will also include bookmarklets and other things that don't have [relevant] sites, so you'll probably want to run a filter on the results to restrict them to actual web URLs. Whatever you use in B to get the sites might test for this first anyway and return an error on invalid URLs.

B) reduce the list of bookmark URLs (A) to the list of hosts they use

I think this is what you want? Or maybe domains? Except if it's like *.co.uk or similar? This is probably most sensibly done in the same script that you use in A. Another option is to pipe it through a sed | sort | uniq filter, though with that option you don't end up actually parsing the URL, and you have to bust out some ghetto regex for it. php is really good at this sort of thing. Well, compared to its appropriateness for most tasks.

C) build a google query URL

...by prefixing each item from B with site:, joining them with the string +OR+, and then url-encoding and appending (after a +) the specific text you want to do a search on. You stick the result on the end of a string like http://www.google.com/search?q=.

This should give you a URL like http://www.google.com/search?q=site:superuser.com+OR+site:stackoverflow.com+chrome

Then you should be able to just pass that URL as the first argument to a command-line invocation of google-chrome to get it to open a new tab containing the search results. Note that, least under bash, you'll need to wrap the URL in quotes so that it doesn't get shell expansion applied to it.

So if you want to, you can roll this into a command line utility, and then just run it by passing your search terms to it. If Chrome is running, you should probably make a copy of the Bookmarks file before reading it in, and then delete the temp file afterwards.

If you already know JS, and especially if you don't know command-line-friendly scripting languages, it might be easier to learn how how to write a Chrome extension than to rig this up.

0

I think the only way to do this is to use the bookmark manager. You could make your own search engine just searching your bookmarked sites, but that's a little far fetched I guess. I guess the best way is to use the book manager by pressing shift+ctrl+b.

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  • 1
    Ctrl-shift-b only allows me to search for bookmarks, not for a term on the bookmarked sites. I'm playing around with creating a Google custom search engine (google.com/cse) but it's more manual than I'd hoped; I still need a way to get sites I bookmark over into CSE.
    – Michelle
    Jan 13, 2010 at 17:06
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it looks like you CAN search for them but you have to use the dedicated searchbox for bookmarks in the manager http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=95714

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  • No, this only searches the actual bookmarks, not the pages the bookmarks are pointing to.
    – Tal Weiss
    Aug 5, 2010 at 14:26
0

This might not be actually a straight forward solution, but then you can use Historio.us. It's a social bookmarking tool that lets you search your bookmarks.

0

You can try and search your history, and that might yield some results.

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Concatenating a bunch of site: parameters (e.g., site:superuser.com OR site:stackoverflow.com+chrome ...) will run into Google's limit of 32 words per query. Minus the query term, that means you would only be able to search through 31 different domains that you've bookmarked.

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