How do you find something you remember seeing online, but can't remember where?
A problem I've been thinking about while building something recently.
There are two very different searches:
“Find me something about X.”
and
“Find me that thing I saw about X three months ago.”
The first one is easy — search engines are great at it.
The second one is surprisingly difficult.
You might remember:
roughly what it was about
that it was a video/article/repo/post
a few words from it
what you were trying to learn at the time
…but not the title, URL, author, or where you originally found it.
Bookmarks don't always help because you still have to remember that you bookmarked it and where you put it.
Browser history can contain thousands of unrelated pages.
So I'm curious about how people actually solve this today.
When you remember the information but not where you found it, what's your process for tracking it down?
And if you could search your past internet activity using what you remember, rather than the exact title or URL, what would you want that search to understand?
Replies
I usually start with Google and describe the idea rather than search the exact phrase. surprisingly that works sometimes.
Promomix
My browser history becomes useless after a few weeks. i remember the context perfectly but the URL is completely gone.
Bababot
I’d want search to understand why o saved something not just what was on the page. that context feels much more searchable.
This happens to me with GitHub repos constantly. i remember the problem the repo solved but never but almost never the repository name.
I usually search my own notes first then Slack then browser history. Its basically digital archaeology at this point.
Buffup.AI
Screenshots are another huge source of this problem. I remember seeing the information but have no idea which app or conversation it came from.
I think the hardest signal would be distinguishing something i merely opened from something i actually found. that could make this much smarter.