I've been frustrated by many of the same things, and have recently been playing with Memex.
The solution outlined here leaves me with a couple of questions, though.
1. Since there's a local app acting as a service, it's not clear to me how this would run on a mobile device.
2. Once it is running on my mobile device (and home computer, and work computer, and chromebook, and various other machines I use), how do I aggregate all of the data? I'd like to be doing work-related research at home in the evening, and be able to see the fruits of it from the office.
I suspect that the answer to this is the same thing: that rather than a locally-running server, I could put something on my home server or on a cloud-based server, and direct all my various devices to communicate with that rather than localhost?
Yep, you could use a VPS or something and host it behind a reverse proxy, that's what I've been doing so far.
Also for mobile specifically, on Android it works under Termux (haven't personally tried yet, but can't see why not, and the person in the issue I linked claims it works).
For data aggregation: it depends on the data source, but the easiest seems to make sure your data ends on a single computer, index it there, and after than you get an sqlite database which you can simply sync with Dropbox/Syncthing or anything else you prefer.
The solution outlined here leaves me with a couple of questions, though.
1. Since there's a local app acting as a service, it's not clear to me how this would run on a mobile device.
2. Once it is running on my mobile device (and home computer, and work computer, and chromebook, and various other machines I use), how do I aggregate all of the data? I'd like to be doing work-related research at home in the evening, and be able to see the fruits of it from the office.
I suspect that the answer to this is the same thing: that rather than a locally-running server, I could put something on my home server or on a cloud-based server, and direct all my various devices to communicate with that rather than localhost?