All 100 ideasReading and news
#53 of 100 · Reading and news
Bookmarks you can actually search
A private, lasting bookmark manager that imports from every browser, auto-tags and searches saved pages, without relying on a fragile service.
Asks per year
What the askers want
- Would pay0%
- Want it local or private33%
- Object to subscriptions17%
- Want it open source or self-hosted8%
- Want AI to do it8%
Share of the 12 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.
What exists on Show HN
Tried, never finished11 Show HN launches do part of this. None does the whole job.
Instead of: Delicious, Pinboard, Pocket
The idea, as matched
A bookmark manager that imports bookmarks from every browser, tags and auto-organises them (possibly with AI), searches the full text of saved pages, and syncs privately across devices without depending on a fragile startup.
Jev first matched 16 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 12 of 16.
Every ask, newest first
Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.
Reader’s note. Clusters when Delicious and Pocket changed or closed.
- May 2025Wants a simple bookmarking service that survives technology shifts, after Delicious and Pocket both disappeared. Read it: a comment in “Mozilla to shut down Pocket on July 8”
- Feb 2025Wants a tool that auto-categorizes thousands of bookmarks and makes them searchable by the page content. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Is there a tool to categorize and summarize all of my bookmarks?”
- Feb 2023Wants browsers to offer searchable bookmarks that can be managed like files in folders. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Are browser bookmarks dead? What alternative(s) do you use?”
- May 2019Wants a replacement for Scrapbook X that imports thousands of saved pages. Read it: a comment in “Internet Data Is Rotting”
- Mar 2018Wants a bookmark manager with tagging and automatic domain sorting that works with Firefox for around 1000 bookmarks. Read it: a comment in “Show HN: Shiori – Simple self hosted bookmarks manager”
- Dec 2015Wants a tool to archive a large bookmark collection so it becomes easy to search. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?”
- May 2014Wants a self-run copy of Delicious for private bookmarks, not social sharing. Read it: a comment in “YouTube Founders to Sell Delicious, a Social Bookmarking Site”
- Dec 2013Wants a program that crawls bookmarks and automatically tags, classifies and indexes them by headline and keywords. Read it: a comment in “I've Been Using Evernote All Wrong. Here's Why It's Actually Amazing”
- Jan 2012Wants an offline, browser-independent bookmark organizer that imports from all browsers, dedupes, tags and syncs with iPhone. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: What's a software program you WISH existed?”
- Sep 2011Wants a Delicious alternative since messy tags made it useless, with Pinboard's fee being a barrier. Read it: a comment in “AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure”
- Sep 2011Wants a free Delicious alternative with tagging and a Chrome sync extension. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Which is the best free Delicious alternative?”
- Mar 2009Wants private, tag-searchable bookmarks synced across machines, since Delicious is public by default and Firefox tagging is weak. Read it: a post: “Ask YC: how do you manage bookmarks?”
Building this?
Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.
Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own
This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.
$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.