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Fannon / search-bookmarks-history-and-tabs

Browser extension to search and navigate browser tabs, local bookmarks and history.
MIT License
187 stars 8 forks source link

Additional search options #129

Open vertigo220 opened 2 months ago

vertigo220 commented 2 months ago

There are a couple additional options that would be helpful with improving searching. The first would be to add a whitelist/include only list that, if used, would only show results that match those keywords. Users could use URLs (with the same rules as when used in the exclude list, including the recent change to match anything it includes) or words, e.g. YouTube or Amazon. This could get to be a pain, and even cause problems if users forget to remove them, so maybe it could add them at the bottom of the pop-up with an x button to remove them (there could even be an interface to add/remove them at the bottom, as well as possibly to add/remove exclusions, and/or right-clicking on a search result could show an interface for doing so).

The second addition would be to add an option (or options) to only show results matching certain fields, or exclude matching certain fields. For example, I wanted to just match page titles, and was getting a lot of URL matches cluttering up the results, so I tried changing scoreUrlWeight to 0, thinking it would zero out any of those matches and not show them, but it didn't work.

Fannon commented 2 months ago

The first would be to add a whitelist/include only list that, if used, would only show results that match those keywords.

Not sure, I understand. Have you looked into how to use tags / bookmark folders to excactly match / limit search results via it?

Btw. I've thought about a rather nerdy edition, to allow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression search. This would be very powerful and still fast. However, writing Regexp is nothing for the faint of heart...

The second addition would be to add an option (or options) to only show results matching certain fields, or exclude matching certain fields. For example, I wanted to just match page titles,

Unfortunately this will not work because both search algorithms look over a combined search string. What you propose would need a way more sophisticated search engine. But yes, that's why there are options like scoreUrlWeight, but they are very limited in how much they help here.

vertigo220 commented 2 months ago

Tags and folders are related to specifics about the page titles and to bookmarks, respectively. I'm talking about being able to limit searches based on specific terms, e.g. if I'm doing a bunch of searches on Amazon pages, I could type 'Amazon' as a search term on every search, but that gets tedious. It would be much easier to be able to tell it somehow to limit my results to only ones that include that term, or a certain url, e.g. 'amazon dot com.' Not sure if you use Everything, but it would be comparable to filters in that.

I considered regex, too, and while I'm a big fan of it, and use it a lot, including sometimes with Everything, I personally don't see the need here. Even as much browsing as I do, as many windows and tabs as I have open, as extensive and varied as my history is, I don't find I need it, and haven't had an instance where I wished it was there. History searches are just pretty basic. That said, I suppose the need could certainly arise, especially with searching for using character classes and ORs ( |'s ) to show multiple results. But then, for most of those instances, you could just do multiple searches pretty easily. I don't personally see the use of these things in the same way I do when searching a file system for example, like with Everything, or searching a text/code file in Notepad++/notepadqq/Sublime/etc. But then, just because I don't, doesn't mean others don't. I guess it depends by what you mean by "writing Regexp is nothing for the faint of heart." If you mean users writing it to put it to use, so what. Let those that know how use it and those that don't either just not use it or, if they have the need, they can learn it, as it's a good thing to know. If you mean actually writing the code to implement it, that's when I'd say it's probably not worth it here.

Unfortunately this will not work because both search algorithms look over a combined search string

Are you saying it simply takes the entirety of the history entry, i.e. the title AND url, and looks at them as a single, whole string, instead of searching each individually? Couldn't it use the http(s):// as a separator to determine if the terms are part of the title or url? Granted, that could be an issue if the page title is the url, but I don't even know if I've ever seen that, at least not for many years.

a rather nerdy edition

The proper word here is addition. Not trying to be rude, I just know you're in Germany so English is likely your second or even third language, and figured you might want to know this. And by the way, your English is excellent, I wouldn't have guessed it's not your first language.