> I've wasted many an hour combing through Google and my search history to look up a good article, blog post, or just something I've seen before.

This is the fault of web browser vendors who have yet to give a damn about book marks.

> Apollo is a search engine and web crawler to digest your digital footprint. What this means is that you choose what to put in it. When you come across something that looks interesting, be it an article, blog post, website, whatever, you manually add it (with built in systems to make doing so easy).

So it's a searchable database for bookmarks then.

> The first thing you might notice is that the design is reminiscent of the old digital computer age, back in the Unix days. This is intentional for many reasons. In addition to paying homage to the greats of the past, this design makes me feel like I'm searching through something that is authentically my own. When I search for stuff, I genuinely feel like I'm travelling through the past.

This does not make any sense. It's Unix-like because it feels old? It seems like the author thoroughly misses the point of unix philosophy.

> So it's a searchable database for bookmarks then.

It appears to be that, but it appears also to pull out the content of the web page and index that too, so you can (presumably) find stuff that isn't in the "pure" bookmark, which I think of as a link with maybe a title.

I think browsers should download a full copy of each bookmark (so you can still see it when they are taken down) and make it fully searchable.

Actually, I've been trying to find Firefox extensions that give a better interface to bookmarks and there doesn't seem to be one. It's like, people don't use bookmarks anymore and accept that it might as well not exist, and use something else.

It's telling that Firefox has two bookmark systems built-in (pocket and regular bookmarks) and they aren't integrated with each other; I suppose that people that use pocket never think about regular bookmarks.

edit: but my pet peeve is that it isn't easy to search history for something I saw 10 days ago but I don't remember the exact keywords to search.

>I think browsers should download a full copy of each bookmark [...] and make it fully searchable.

This, outside a browser, could be implemented as a server/client self-hosted solution with a back-end taking care of downloading/searching and an extension acting as client. Maybe it could even be made entirely as extension?

That would miss all the personalized content, all the content behind authorization and so on.

At the very least, it would need to be able to get the content pushed to it by the client, the way the client has it at moment of bookmarking, making the download/scraping kindof superflous.

Indexing and doing search, however, is hard, but solved. Hard in the sense that it is not something a firefox addon could do very well. I presume a (self)hosted meilisearch would suffice, though.

Edit: here's the description from their repo

"ArchiveBox is a powerful, self-hosted internet archiving solution to collect, save, and view sites you want to preserve offline.

You can set it up as a command-line tool, web app, and desktop app (alpha), on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

You can feed it URLs one at a time, or schedule regular imports from browser bookmarks or history, feeds like RSS, bookmark services like Pocket/Pinboard, and more. See input formats for a full list.

It saves snapshots of the URLs you feed it in several formats: HTML, PDF, PNG screenshots, WARC, and more out-of-the-box, with a wide variety of content extracted and preserved automatically (article text, audio/video, git repos, etc.). See output formats for a full list."