Is there a way to search the text of my browsing history in Firefox?

I often find myself in the situation where I know I saw something in a web page recently, but don't remember where. I would therefore like to be able to do a full-text search of the contents of my web history in Firefox. Is there an extension that will do this?

I am aware of this question. However, I am only interested in Firefox solutions, and the only Firefox option in that question seems to no longer be relevant (add-on has changed).

My requirements for a solution to this problem:

Must work in Firefox.
Must work locally - I do not want to send my history or bookmarks to a 3rd-party service to get this functionality (so InfoAxe is out as near as I can tell).
Must be a high-quality, reputable extension (fuzzy, I know, but many extensions smell sketchy).
Must work in Linux (so Google Desktop is out so far as I know).
Strongly prefer open source solution.

Does anyone know of such an extension?

Michael Ekstrand

Posted 2011-06-13T14:09:19.793

Reputation: 512

any new stuff about this topic? fetching.io looks like its not maintained any more, and so is recallmonkey. – pvinis – 2015-10-05T08:48:54.657

Pretty much the same question, just saw: http://superuser.com/questions/277023/how-to-search-page-content-in-firefox-history-like-is-possible-in-google-chrome

– Michael Ekstrand – 2011-06-13T16:14:24.473

Answers

Mozilla Labs has something called RecallNonkey that's being developed for this purpose. http://mozillalabs.com/prospector/2011/06/20/recallmonkey-finds-what-you-forget/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/prospector-recall-monkey/

This is a local search against the history entries in the places database and I don't believe it sends any information out there - it's still pretty new/experimental but I've been using it for a little while and it seems to work well.

Stephanie

Posted 2011-06-13T14:09:19.793

Reputation: 1 778

I should add, https://github.com/mozilla/prospector/tree/master/recallMonkey - not clear what the license is from the source but I've asked for clarification.

– Stephanie – 2011-07-10T00:08:38.837

https://github.com/mozilla/prospector/issues/583#issuecomment-1540712 confirms that it's under an open source license (MPL). – Stephanie – 2011-07-10T17:04:48.720

3RecallMonkey does not seem to include a fulltext index of the browsing history. It rather provides a refinable search of the existing history data using a webpage UI. So no more than URLs and page titles can be searched. Unfortunately. – deepc – 2012-06-26T22:29:45.387

another way (only if when you use Firefox you are logged to Google account) is search for inside history via Google cache – Pol Hallen – 2014-06-16T21:26:27.810

Use recoll desktop search along with the recollweb firefox extension. This copies visited pages to local cache that recoll indexes.

Recoll desktop search: http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/

Firefox extension: http://recollfirefox.sourceforge.net/

Sameer

Posted 2011-06-13T14:09:19.793

Reputation: 181