286544 - bookmark automatic indexing

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement)

Description

[Arnaud Legout]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050223 Firefox/1.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050223 Firefox/1.0.1

The older a bookmark, the less I use it because I am unable to remember its
title in order to do a fast bookmark search. Most of the time the title is even
not relevant. And, I don't want to bother me changing the title with relevant
keywords for each new bookmark. 

A very nice functionnality would be to have an automatic indexing (as performed
by a web crawler) of the bookmarks on access. When you click on a bookmark, or
when you access a link that is bookmarked, an indexing on the words on the page
is made. When you do a fast bookmark search, the search is performed on the
title, and also of the index database. 

It is important to perform the indexing of bookmarks on access only. Indeed,
when you create a bookmark, you make a mental matching between the bookmark and
its content. If you reindex automatically the bookmark and the content
significantly changes, you will not see the bookmak in your fast search using
keywords that are no more valid for the new content. That could be very
disturbing because you know you have a relevant bookmark, but you are unable to
find it. However, returning, with the fast bookmark search, a bookmark based on
a content that has changed give you a chance to remember what this bookmark was
about and why its content has changed. 

Here I give a small use case. I am seeking for bookmarks related to Firefox.
If in the fast bookmark search I entered firefox and found 5 bookmarks:
*Inside Firefox
*Geckozone: le portail francophone des logiciels basés sur Gecko (Firefox,
Mozilla, Thunderbird, Camino, Nvu, etc.)	
*Blake Ross >> Firefox
*Mozilla Firefox: Extensions
*Mozilla Firefox 1.0 Roadmap

But I have many more bookmarks related to firefox that an automatic indexing
will allow me to find, because the word Firefox is in the content (as a short
excerpt of very relevant bookmarks, in fact I have around 20 relevant bookmarks):
*MozillaZine
*MozillaNews
*mozilla.org
*french Mozilla

The result of this lack of functionality is that instead of searching my
bookmarks, I search google. I only keep a small set of bookmarks in the root
folder. When I archive a bookmark in a relevant folder, it is most of the time
lost forever.

This indexing functionality will significantly improve the scalability of the
bookmarks. You will be able to consider bookmarks as your own vision of the Web,
and thus only search for the Web that is relevant to you.


Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Bogdan Stroe]

Duplicate of bug 114409, only that the idea of indexing bookmark pages it's not
explicit there.

Comment 2

[Arnaud Legout]

The idea of indexing bookmarks is at the core of this enhancement request.
I don't know whether we can say it is a duplicate. 

Comment 3

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

MAS bugs are separate.  We don't share the bookmarks implementation.

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
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Comment 5

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

preventing auto-resolve (+ it's a valid request)

->NEW

doable when bookmarks become a database i/o in a file ?
might be better for an extension though

Comment 6

[Arnaud Legout]

I do not believe it should be part of an extension. 
Bookmarks are at the core of browsers. However, they are less an less used, 
because it is faster to use google than bookmarks. 

Having a way to personalize your search by bookmarking links that once interested 
you would greatly improve the usability of bookmarks. 
This way they are no more a plain list of links, but a personal database of your
areas of interests.

Comment 10

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

We're not going to index content of the pages in Places (it may happen in Activity Stream or elsewhere, but for sure not in Places).