Ask HN: Is there a tool to categorize and summarize all of my bookmarks?

by reader9274 on 2/15/2025, 8:36:41 AM with 3 comments
Over the years, I've accumulated thousands of bookmarks on my browser. I've manually set folders for them and tried adding them appropriately as I went. However, after years of adding and adjusting, they have become very difficult to manage.

I'm wondering if there's a tool that would do some or all of these things:

1. Auto organize all my bookmarks into categories 2. Make bookmarks searchable by the content of the website they point to

If nothing like this exists, I wonder if I should write it myself, either as a browser extension or a separate program. I'd assume it'd look something like this: pull bookmark link content -> run it through an LLM to categorize and summarize -> store.

Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated!

  • by cello3m on 2/19/2025, 12:30:37 PM

    I think https://mymind.com/ might be trying to build what you are looking for, I didn't use it myself, but I read around that the auto-categorization and content-search are not so great though.

    I personally use manual tags to organize my bookmarks as I find them easier to maintain than a very rigid hierarchical folder structure. I also find that having to force yourself not to create too many tags is helpful rather than disruptive.

    About the "I wonder if I should write it myself" it seems that the bookmarks app space is quite crowded so I guess it'd depend on what you'd like to achieve with the project. I ended up building https://www.keepalink.com if you'd like to give a try to using manual tags with minimal friction. This is a very young project and I'm not sure if it will support automatic tagging and content search at some point though (which seems more in line with what you are looking for right now).

  • by k310 on 2/15/2025, 3:44:29 PM

    I bookmark very few URL's. First, sites I visit often, like the Yosemite webcams [0], HN, and so on, and posts of mine that I often reference in replies, so they show up in the search/URL bar.

    The rest? I drag the URL to a folder on disk, so the computer can search and find links. Firefox does this nicely "just drag, without clicking". Safari adds another step, rant deleted.

    As files, you can do anything you want with them, unlike bookmarks, whose utility is limited by the browser (unless you export them) That's why the Good Lord invented Unix, and someone else (hee, hee) invented the browser.

    [0] Courtesy of the Yosemite Conservancy https://yosemite.org

  • by vednig on 2/15/2025, 12:47:51 PM

    I've stopped bookmarking URLs just because I've got so many that I can't manage them any longer