Search Bookmarks, History and Browser Tabs

🔎 Browser extension to (fuzzy) search and navigate bookmarks, history and open tabs.

Available as Chrome Extension, Microsoft Edge Addon, Firefox Addon and Opera Addon (only an old version).

Features

This extension does not collect any data nor does it make any external requests (see Privacy).

It supports two different search approaches:

• Exact search (case-insensitive, but exact matching): Faster, but only exact matching results.
• Fuzzy search (approximate matching): Slower, but also includes inexact (fuzzy) matches.

With this extension you can also tag your bookmarks including auto completions. The tags are considered when searching and can be used for navigation. Tabs support now the tab grouping feature by the browser.

The extension is very customizable (see user options) and has a dark / light theme that is selected based on your system settings (see prefers-color-scheme). It's also very lightweight (< 120kb JavaScript, only ~30-40kb need to load initially - including dependencies).

💡 Have a look at the Tips & Tricks collection.

🗎 For a list of recent changes, see CHANGELOG.md.

Screenshots & Demo

Press play to start the GIF animation:

User Documentation

• Search Strategies: Switch between precise and fuzzy approach by clicking on the FUZZY or PRECISE button in the search bar (top right).
• Keyboard Shortcut: Trigger the extension via keyboard.
  • The default is CTRL + Shift + ., but you can customize this (I personally use Ctrl+J).
• Open selected results: By default, the extension will open the selected result in a new active tab, or switch to an existing tab with the target URL.
  • Hold Shift or Alt to open the result in the current tab.
  • Hold Ctrl to open the result without closing the popup.
  • Right-click to copy URL to clipboard.
• Search Modes: In case you want to be more selective -> use a search mode:
  • Start your query with #: only bookmarks with the tag will be returned (exact "starts with" search)
    • Supports AND search, e.g. search for #github #pr to only get results which have both tags
    • Supports search within tags: Filter by tag and search for text simultaneously.
      • Usage: #Tag + Double Space + SearchTerm (e.g. #dev react).
      • Tip: Press TAB to quickly insert the double-space separator.
  • Start your query with ~: only bookmarks within the folder will be returned (exact "starts with" search)
    • Supports AND search, e.g. search for ~Sites ~Blogs to only get results in both folders
    • Supports search within folders: Filter by folder and search for text simultaneously.
      • Usage: ~Folder + Double Space + SearchTerm (e.g. ~Work project).
      • Tip: Press TAB to quickly insert the double-space separator.
  • Start your query with @: only tabs in the named group will be returned
    • Example: @Work to find all tabs in the "Work" tab group
    • Supports search within groups: Filter by group and search for text simultaneously.
      • Usage: @Group + Double Space + SearchTerm (e.g. @Work jira).
      • Tip: Press TAB to quickly insert the double-space separator.
  • Start your query with b (including space): only bookmarks will be searched.
  • Start your query with h (including space): only history and open tabs will be searched.
  • Start your query with t (including space): only open tabs will be searched.
  • Start your query with s (including space): only search engines will be proposed.
  • Custom Aliases:
    • The option customSearchEngines allows you to define your own search mode aliases
    • Default: Start your query with g (including space): Do a Google search.
    • Default: Start your query with d (including space): Do a dict.cc search.
  • A search term that can be interpreted as URL (e.g. example.com) can be navigated to directly.
• Emacs / Vim Navigation:
  • Ctrl+N and Ctrl+J to navigate search results down
  • Ctrl+K and Ctrl+P to navigate search results up
• Special Browser Pages: You can add special browser pages to your bookmarks, like chrome://downloads.
• Custom Scores: Add custom bonus scores by putting +<whole number> to your bookmark title (before tags)
  • Examples: Bookmark Title +20 or Another Bookmark +10 #tag1 #tag2
• Tags:
  • A bookmark title cannot start with a tag, it needs a title
  • Tags cannot start with a number. This is how the extension filters out issue / ticket numbers.
• Icons & Favicons: This extension can display favicons or result type icons next to your search results.
  • To customize this, see displayIcons and displayFavicons in the user configuration and favicons in OPTIONS.md for details on privacy, implementation, and browser support.
• This extension works best if you avoid:
  • using # in bookmark titles that do not indicate a tag.
  • using ~ in bookmark folder names.

User Configuration

The extension is highly customizable. Finding and setting options is a bit technical, though.

The user options are written in YAML or JSON notation.

📘 See OPTIONS.md for a comprehensive list of all available options.

For advanced users, there is also a JSON Schema available.

You can also browse the source in options.js for inline documentation.

When defining your custom config, you only need to define the options that you want to overwrite from the defaults. The extension will validate your input against the JSON schema before saving.

An exemplary user config can look like the following example:

searchStrategy: fuzzy
displayVisitCounter: true
historyMaxItems: 2048 # Increase max number of browser history items to load
maxRecentTabsToShow: 32 # Limit number of recent tabs shown (default: 8)

If you have troubles with performance, here are a few options that might help. Feel free to pick & choose and tune the values to your situation. In particular historyMaxItems and how many bookmarks you have will impact init and search performance.

Here is a suggestion for low-performance machines:

searchStrategy: precise # Precise search is faster than fuzzy search.
displaySearchMatchHighlight: false # Not highlighting search matches improves render performance.
searchMaxResults: 20 # Number of search results can be further limited
historyMaxItems: 512 # Number of browser history items can be further reduced
maxRecentTabsToShow: 4 # Reduce number of recent tabs for better performance
detectDuplicateBookmarks: false # Disable duplicate detection for faster startup (if you don't have duplicates)

Or a more advanced example:

searchStrategy: precise
historyDaysAgo: 14
historyMaxItems: 2048
historyIgnoreList:
  - extension://
  - http://localhost
  - http://127.0.0.1
scoreTabBase: 70 # customize base score for open tabs
detectDuplicateBookmarks: true
maxRecentTabsToShow: 4
searchEngineChoices:
  - name: Google
    urlPrefix: https://google.com/search?q=
customSearchEngines:
  - alias: ['g', 'google']
    name: Google
    urlPrefix: https://www.google.com/search?q=$s
    blank: https://www.google.com
  - alias: d
    name: dict.cc
    urlPrefix: https://www.dict.cc/?s=$s
  - alias: [gh, github]
    name: GitHub
    urlPrefix: https://github.com/search?q=$s
    blank: https://github.com
  - alias: npm
    name: NPM
    urlPrefix: https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=$s
    blank: https://www.npmjs.com

In case of making multilingual search (CJK) correctly, you may need to tweak uFuzzy options via option uFuzzyOptions, for example:

# make CJK chars work for fuzzy search
uFuzzyOptions:
  interSplit: (p{Unified_Ideograph=yes})+

Scoring System

The scoring system calculates a relevance score for each search result using a 5-step process:

1. Base Score — Each result type starts with a different base score:

   • Bookmark: 100, Tab: 70, History: 45, Search Engine: 30
   • Custom search aliases and direct URLs score higher (400, 500) to appear at the top

2. Search Quality Multiplier — The base score is multiplied by the search algorithm's match quality (0–1). Poor fuzzy matches get reduced scores.

3. Match Bonuses — Additional points for how the search term matches:

   • Starts-with bonus: Title or URL begins with the search term (scoreExactStartsWithBonus)
   • Equals bonus: Title exactly matches the search term (scoreExactEqualsBonus)
   • Tag/folder/group match: Search term matches a tag, folder, or tab group name exactly (scoreExactTagMatchBonus, scoreExactFolderMatchBonus, scoreExactGroupMatchBonus)
   • Substring match: Each search word found in title/url/tag/folder/group adds points (scoreExactIncludesBonus), weighted by field (title=1.0 > tag=0.7 > group=0.7 > url=0.6 > folder=0.5), capped at 3 bonuses per result
   • Phrase match: Multi-word searches get bonus when the full phrase appears in title or URL (scoreExactPhraseTitleBonus, scoreExactPhraseUrlBonus)

4. Usage Signals — Points based on browsing behavior:

   • Visit count: Points per visit from history (scoreVisitedBonusScore, up to scoreVisitedBonusScoreMaximum)
   • Recency: Recently visited items get higher scores, scaling linearly from max to 0 over historyDaysAgo
   • Open tab: Bookmarks that are currently open in a tab get a bonus (scoreBookmarkOpenTabBonus)

5. Custom Bonus — User-defined boost via +<number> in bookmark titles (e.g., Important Site +50 #work)

For detailed implementation and all scoring configuration options, see:

• scoring.js — Core scoring algorithm with comprehensive documentation
• OPTIONS.md — Complete list of scoring configuration options

Privacy / Data Protection

This extension is built to respect your privacy:

• It does not have permissions for outside communication, so none of your data is shared or exposed externally.
• The extension does not even store any information except your user settings. Every time the extension popup is closed, it "forgets" everything and starts from a blank slate next time you open it.
• There is no background job / processing. If the popup is not explicitly opened by the user, the extension is not executed.
• The extension only requests the following permissions for the given reasons:
  • bookmarks: Necessary to read and edit the bookmarks. Can be disabled via user configuration.
  • history: Necessary to read the browsing history. Can be disabled or limited via user configuration.
  • tabs: Necessary to find open tabs and to use tabs for navigation. Can be disabled via user configuration.
  • storage: Necessary to store and retrieve the user configuration. If the browser has setting synchronization enabled, the extension settings will be synced (in this case you already trust your browser to sync everything else anyway). If browser sync is disabled, the user configuration is only stored locally.
  • tabGroups: Necessary to read tab group names for the tab group search feature. The feature degrades gracefully if unavailable.
  • favicon: Optional permission, but needed if displayFavicons is enabled: Used for Chrome's native favicon API to retrieve icons for bookmarks and history. This only accesses local data.
• The extension is open source, so feel free to convince yourself :)

Local Development

Local development setup, project structure, and workflows are documented in CONTRIBUTING.md#local-development.

Credits

This extension makes use of the following helpful open-source projects (thanks!):

• https://github.com/leeoniya/uFuzzy for the fuzzy search algorithm
• https://github.com/yairEO/tagify for the tag autocomplete widget
• https://www.npmjs.com/package/js-yaml for the user options parsing
• https://github.com/tabler/tabler-icons for icons
• https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/custom-css-reset/

Feedback and Ideas

Please create a GitHub issue to give your feedback. All ideas, suggestions or bug reports are welcome.