Searchable history

I’m interested in the intersection of the web and desktop apps. One app I’d like to see is a search engine for pages that I’ve visited. I often want to go back to something but can’t remember where it was but I can remember what it was about. A Google search would turn up too many hits. But if I could search just pages I’ve visited then I could find it.

The easy part is dumping the source of a page into MySQL or whatever and running a search page. The hard part is knowing when a new page has been loaded in the browser.

I can think of at least two ways to do the hard part, but I don’t like either way. (Proxy server or app that polls the browser.)

Years ago it worked with Netscape to tell it to please notify me when a new page has been loaded. I wonder if this still works, and which browsers it works with. This would be the best solution. Perhaps I’ll try it. (Or perhaps I’ll work on the dozen other things at the top of my to-do list.)