That's what Firefox' awesome searchbar does. There I just input "jira $projectname" and I get the correct URL. If this does not work, I simply bookmark the page and give it tags. Then entering the tags in the search bar gives the same result.
Firefox also has the little-known keyword functionality. Bookmark https://bugs.example.com/issue/%s, in the bookmark manager give it the keyword `bug`, and then typing “bug PROJ-123456” will take you to https://bugs.example.com/issue/PROJ-123456. (On some search fields there may be an “Add a Keyword for this Search…” item which helps with creating the bookmark with keyword, too.)
A quick look around https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/AP... suggests that it’s not possible to control the keywords and tags from an extension in Firefox; this is a sad omission: I’d really like an extension which imported all of DuckDuckGo’s !bangs as bookmarks with keywords, so that you could type in exactly the same stuff and have it bypass duckduckgo.com.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1276817 is about adding that, but weird stuff is happening there. I’m going to follow it up, because I’d hate to see this functionality lost. I use it for a number of things.
Adding a keyword used to be more prominent and easy to do - you could right click any search bar and "Add as Keyword" - or you could edit the Bookmark link manually when bookmarking a page. They "simplified" bookmarking to where I need to navigate through several layers of menus to access the Bookmark Manager where I can finally edit the bookmark to add a Keyword and update the link to what it needs to be.
I have no idea why they made bookmarks so much more difficult to work with and I'm not sure when it happened - as I updated from FF39 to FF60. Using Quantum for the last few weeks - I'm pretty sure I'll be going back to FF39 as it's simply more usable. Especially since add-ons that were a large part of my workflow actually work (or even exist at all...)
Checked on my work computer and you're right! Something must be going on with my userChrome.css back at home that's inadvertently hiding it from me, since I hide useless context menu options like "Set as Desktop Background...", "Email Image", etc. Something I'm hiding must be hiding "Add as a Keyword for this Search..." on accident.
I wish :contains() had stayed in CSS Selectors Level 3, or that you could use XPath in stylesheets.
Hmm… #contentAreaContextMenu actually looks pretty sane. They all have IDs, which I really should have expected anyway. I’m going to add some rules to my own userChrome.css. Thanks for the idea!
Search engines can also have keywords (see about:preferences#search), but since extensions can’t programmatically create search engines this is not a great deal of help.
I'd like to import DDG bangs into Firefox too, as the 3 redirects DDG does every time are painfully slow. I already have a scripts that imports them directly into the FF bookmark database, but I haven't had the time to figure out how to get a list of DDG bangs. If/when I do, expect a Show HN.
Please do go ahead and make this. It’ll save me the trouble of doing it! I was figuring on just generating a NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file from the JSON and importing it manually.
One thing I'd like to see is autopromoting folders into the tag search. I have some folders for the most common types of links I save, so entering the folder name into the awesome bar should treat it like a tag.
One feature I can see myself using is grouping related tags and autofilling them. Like if I have the tags python, programming, and language grouped together it should autofill the programming and language tags when I enter python as a tag.
Hey, I'm one of the engineer's on gurn. This is true and it works really well, the main focus of gurn is that it allows you to collaborate and share these keywords / bookmarks with others. We're also on Firefox and Chrome, and soon Edge making it easy to hop browsers (great for front-end developers).
Gurn was born in an organisational context, lots of different systems and tools, and everything moving to the web. It can be really hard to stay on top of where the latest policy document is or if someone moves the dev environment to a different server being able to get back to it quickly.
The original idea was to...
1. Make it very easy to remember links - use words that are meaningful to you, not long URLs.
2. Allow storing of deep web links - a large amount of internal content is not indexed by the corporate search engine and the stuff that is out of date.
3. Allow others to update the keywords - the people in the business are an untapped network of knowledge, all it takes is one person to update a keyword and everyone benefits.
As we've developed the product we realised that it was beneficial to individuals too as a really interesting way of navigating their web.
Pocket is more about stashing things to read later and maybe sharing some resources. Gurn is about helping you navigate the web quickly and intuitively - and harnessing the collective knowledge in your group, team, company.
Yeah, this has completely replaced most of my use of bookmarks. Now they mostly exist to improve search results, which is awesome.
And to go a step further: pinboard will crawl and index bookmarked pages if you pay a bit more, so you can search within page contents. I've almost stopped tagging things because I can get close enough just by searching for a keyword or two. Only real downside I encounter is that I can't search pages that are behind a login.
The current workflow in Chrome is, CTRL-D, Name it something memorable, CTRL-SHIFT-O, search your bookmarks.
You can even save all your currently opened tabs with CTRL-SHIFT-D.
I'm just surprised this service doesn't allow sharing of bookmarks to other people, I figure that'd be the one thing that's still "hard". EDIT: I see that it's on their todo list.
EDIT2: Upon further reflection I think the "team" aspect is the right thing to sell to. Synchronized link sharing is still hard, and just having a company wiki most of the time, doesn't make it easier.
Hey, I'm one of the engineers on Gurn! So we do have sharing actually, we have lists to collect keywords (sort of like a bucket) and you can invite others to these lists either via their email or username.
We're also working on Organisations at the moment which will make this even easier and allow you to group together users and lists under one roof. Checkout this link for some more info on list roles https://gurn.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/360000...
I'd be wary of using a service built by a company (Gradient Ltd) that among other things provides, "Effective Attribution, Web Tracking, Analytical Insights".
4. We may collect the following Data, which includes personal Data, from you:
....
l. A list of URLs starting with a referring site, your activity on the Website,
and the site you exit to (automatically collected);
This clause exists as we run Google Analytics on the main gurn.io webpage. It was a standard clause suggested by our lawyers here in the UK to ensure our users are fully informed about the possible data collection being conducted by the GA analytics.js tracking code.
I'm one of the founders of Gradient, the company behind Gurn. I wanted to address this one personally.
First and foremost, Kintra was a completely separate product to Gurn and the products are unrelated in any way. I appreciate how the description of Kintra can be interpreted but let me try and describe it's purpose and see if I can alleviate your concerns.
It was built to address a problem for marketers who were unable to attribute marketing spend and return on investment effectively, in addition to facing the advancing GDPR legislation and the right to be forgotten. At the time, many marketers were using custom events in Google Analytics to track the source of a lead. Due to the walled garden nature of the likes of Twitter Ads / Facebook Ads / Google Ads it can be incredibly difficult to work out which channel is driving a sale when
a) every channel is claiming the sale
and
b) you have no concept of an individual
In addition, without knowing the individual (using an anonymous identifier in a cookie) how you would be able to remove all the data for that individual should a request be served under GDPR? In Google Analytics, due to the way it aggregated its data in order to forget someone, there was the real risk you would need to delete the entire aggregated block of data with many potentially large numbers of user analytics rolled up together. Kintra was built to try and fit this need and is more akin to https://snowplowanalytics.com/ or https://piwik.pro/ solution built with the goal of helping a business understand how effectively they were spending money on social platforms whilst also supporting GDPR and the right to remove an individual's data at their request.
It was designed to be deployed by a client on their own equipment and used only across their own sites, not a large hosted data collection/aggregation platform like Google Analytics that presents one set of data to you about your users but effectively understands how nearly everyone is moving around the internet. We deployed the product to a single client and had no access to the data (as it was self-hosted) and no intent to sell data. As of writing, Kintra has been mothballed whilst we focus on Gurn (lack of focus is the death of startups!) and we can understand the true impact of the GDPR on the web analytics market.
We take our users data and it's security very seriously. With respect to Gurn we only ever interact with your browser when you initiate the software by opening the extension and explicitly performing an action in the UI such as adding a keyword, or when you type 'go' into the address bar. Our business model is driven by generating revenue from teams and larger organisations to enable the provision of a limited free tier for individuals.
I think Finda (https://keminglabs.com/finda/) fills a similar need, runs offline, and indexes lots of other stuff as well. Although I think it is not possible to assign additional keywords.
Cool! This looks like go/ links, the internal URL shortener that Google uses and which a lot of other tech companies subsequently adopted (I wrote about it here: http://blog.goatcodes.com/2018/04/18/go-origin)
Full disclaimer: I built goatcodes.com to be a hosted version of go/ links, short links for teams. It serves a similar purpose to Gurn, albeit in a slightly different way. Think bit.ly, but you have to log in before the redirect.
Can I ask what in particular about our privacy policy concerns you so that I can address your concerns? It's a fairly standard privacy policy developed with our lawyers here in the UK. I have already addressed others concerns further down the comments about referer / ip collection which is required wording as we use Google Analytics on our main website. If there is anything else of concern I'd really like to understand it so I can try to work with our lawyers to address it.
This looks nice. I've asked myself, what advantage this tool has over using simple bookmarks with keywords. If I understand this correctly, the answer is about being able to share the bookmarks with your team (and across browsers). I would make this point much more prominent.
Here's a shameless plug for my tool StaticMarks [0], as I try to solve a similar problem, but for a different audience (mostly developers). The "marketing" page explaining exactly what the tool does is still a work in progress, though.
Here’s an article from 2010 talking about AOL keywords at the turn of the millennium:
How many of you remember watching TV about a decade ago, and seeing commercials for large, well-known companies (and I mean really large ones—say, for example, Proctor & Gamble) and hearing “visit us on the world wide web at www.tidedetergent.com, or type in AOL Keyword: ‘laundry‘”?
I was thinking about this the other day… AOL was way ahead of the curve on this. They were so far ahead of the curve that it didn’t catch on. I know some people just slightly younger than me might say “AOL? Who’s that?” But the fact is, AOL was really a cutting-edge company in the dot-com era. I suppose in one sense, you can’t even call them a dot-com company, cause they provided the framework for the dot-coms without really being one themselves. (Plus they’re still around!) In a way, they actually ushered in the internet age, and survived. Funny thought.
But here’s what I’ve been thinking about… keywords were an idea so brilliant, we just accept them as a fact of life today. But at the time, AOL was the only one even thinking like that. I never knew what their policy was on how they assigned different keywords to different companies [does anyone know? was it auction-style? or just first-come-first-serve?], but I do know that they were attempting to make our online search efforts easier by coming up with simple, streamlined, logical one or two-word keywords that we could type into a special box in the AOL browser and, Voila! We would end up at exactly the most logical website for that type of word.
Alt+Space brings up an edit box. Then type to perform some action. Actions can be as simple as opening a bookmark or launching an application. (Keypirinha indexes the bookmarks in all installed browsers, the Windows start menu and a whole lot more.)
Keypirinha will be familiar to users of Launchy or Find And Run Robot. (But Keypirinha is better!)
Keypirinha is one of the first bits of software I install after installing Windows. I can't recommend it highly enough!
Watching the animated demo on the home page, this looks a lot like how I use Vimium (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...) to handle bookmarks - give them memorable names, then press 'b' and type until you see the one you want, and press Enter.
Does this offer more that I'm missing? Or is the target market not the kinds of people who would use something like Vimium?
I'm curious if this is any better than a well designed custom landing page, which could even be set as the new tab in a browser. Everyone is already familiar with links and webpages yet using the navbar in this way is pretty rare, the only other case I can think of is duckduckgo's bang feature[0].
Hey, I'm one of the engineers building Gurn. We've actually thought a lot about this, almost creating a personal home page for your browser which could be a starting place for navigating to common groups of urls etc. We're still figuring out how this might work and how it could fit into the product at the moment but stay tuned!
Thinking of bookmarks and then thinking of history, what I really want is a personal search engine that only searches things you've browsed. Where was that article I read on $subject? I recall the snippet $snippet. Where is that funny picture I saw a few months ago about the old man? It would be perfect in this chat.
A good personal search engine might
further alleviate the need for bookmarks.
I found it interesting that self hosting costs more than cloud. I’m sure there are lots of reasons. @gurn engineers, can you share some of your reasoning behind this? I’m curious the % of self host vs cloud.
We make it cheaper to host in the cloud as there is significantly less burden upon us as a small company in supporting our cloud offering. When we use the term self-host we are actually talking about on-premise clients, think places that might operate under an air-gap such as financial institutions, government departments etc. We've found that these organisations don't particularly enjoy the fast-paced development and release cycles that you can deliver in a continuous deployment environment such as the cloud and we end up with fragmented versions in use across clients. As such we want to encourage as many businesses to stick to the cloud environment as possible and price accordingly.
To date, our largest installations are on-prem, as companies we've dealt with are still getting comfortable with the cloud.
We also have the concept of on-prem/off-prem where we can spin up a dedicated cloud environment should the company require it, but again this involves an extra cost to us and is factored into "self-host" price.
Thanks for the explanation. That was my thought. Assise from the support issues, on prem may be more valuable to those customers. Definitely charge more for things that are more valuable to customers.
Yes they do, we're focusing a lot on sharing and collaborating which browsers don't provide. This way you could be using a keyword happily and if you notice it goes to an out dated resource, you can update it and others in your team will get that update instantly without having to do it themselves.
"Gurn" is actually in the English dictionary and it's meant "to pull an ugly face" long before it was linked to drug taking. In fact the World Gurning Championships have been running since the 13th century.
Frankly though, if your naming requirements are "must not appear in Urban Dictionary", then people might as well just give up naming things now. UD pretty much has every real and imaginary word in its database as well as half of all the possible acronyms in the world too.
Hey, I'm one of the co-founders of Gurn... Yeah the name is definitely a talking point!
In the UK, you're spot om, it does have the connotation of pulling an ugly face - the exact same type of face all our colleagues used to pull when they couldn't find the web resources they needed! Outside of the UK people tend to see it just as a short and memorable 4-letter word :-)
Using Gurn as the name is also a pun on how the tool works - you type 'go' in the address bar, followed by a keyword. The Keyword acts like an old school URN... So you 'go urn'... hence Gurn :-)
I'm not using social bookmarking either, but I can see the appeal of being able to discover quality resources easily (when following reputable people). That's basically what "awesome lists" on GitHub are for.
del.icio.us was big back in the day, before Yahoo ruined it, so I guess some people want it? Although, to be fair, that was before recent privacy letdowns.
