How to search inside a specific bookmark folder

[s0j0urn]

As the title says, how can we search only inside a specific bookmark folder?

Also, typing inside the search box is quite slow. It appears as if the browser hangs every time I start typing inside the search box.

[Fannon]

Hi @s0j0urn ,

regarding the performance - which search mode are you using and how many bookmarks / history items do you index? How fast is your machine? The "precise" search mode should be faster than the fuzzy search mode.

I've spent quite some time looking into the performance aspects and made sure I chose high-performance options or optimized where possible. However, this is still web-technology and not native code / GUI.

I like the idea of searching only inside a specific bookmark folder. Not entirely sure how to trigger this, though. Do you have any ideas / expectations how this could work?

[s0j0urn]

@Fannon I tried both precise and fuzzy searches. Fuzzy search is completely unusable for me. My machine is relatively fast, it's an i7 8850H, 32GB RAM, 4th gen nvme SSD. Although, the particular folder I am trying to search inside has around 800 links bookmarked. It's a private community-contributed bookmark folder.

Start your query with ~: only bookmarks within the folder will be returned

I thought this option would allow me to search inside a specific bookmark folder. How about once we have selected the folder any text we type is searching inside that particular folder.

Also, just as an example this extension allows setting up a folder as a root and then search only inside it. But, when I tried it was showing duplicate links for each result. Not sure why.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-manager-and-view/mnhojcjhcilkgkmijhphlbmghmmdhlfg

[Fannon]

I thought this option would allow me to search inside a specific bookmark folder. How about once we have selected the folder any text we type is searching inside that particular folder.

Ok, your machine is definitely a fast one and faster than some laptops I work with. But if just the one folder already has 800 links (nice idea, to have community managed bookmarks!), then the sheer amount of bookmarks may be bringing the performance down. To give you some background, the extension is not creating search indexes but performing the search live with in-memory data.

That's clearly a tradeoff. The extension starts faster and is immediately ready. But the price is slower search performance. For me, "slow" was still in the range of < 10ms, usually even <1ms, so a good tradeoff for my situations.

I thought this option would allow me to search inside a specific bookmark folder. How about once we have selected the folder any text we type is searching inside that particular folder.

Yes, I see why you'd expect that. The problem is that Bookmark folders also contain spaces and therfore I cannot use spaces to separate search terms. Let me think about how to fix / enhance that. The suggestion definately makes sense. And it should also help with the performance problem, because then the search is only done on a reduced subset.

[leeoniya]

this feels pretty strange. fuzzy search should be able to handle filtering even 500K items without perf issues. i'd be interested in seeing a profile with the full haystack and needle to see where the bottleneck is.

[Fannon]

• So how many bookmarks are we talking about - total?
• Which browser are you using?
• And what is your expectation of "not laggy" - so how many ms should it be most (if you have an idea about that- I guess this is hard to tell and very subjective)?

I've just profiled a little bit and in my case, the actual searching is not causing the main performance issues. Overall the extension spends more time on rendering than searching. So maybe this is where I should look into performance optimizations next.

[Fannon]

@s0j0urn - just if you're into the technical side and feel comfortable trying this out: Can you:

• Enable developer mode for extensions, e.g. in edge://extensions
• Right click on the extension icon and select "Inspect Popup Window"
• In the Developer Toolbar, go on "Performance Tab"
• Click on the button right next to record: "Start Profiling and Reload Page".
• Then start entering a search term where you have performance issues
• Stop recording

You should now see basically three different types of activities. You can always hover over some parts to see how long they take individually:

Initializing the extension and loading the data from the browser

This is mostly busy with loading bookmarks and history from the browser API and converting it to a format that is used for search algorithms.

First search

The first search spends most time as it not only has the biggest haystack to search through. My feeling is that also the browser has to do the most layouting. From what I observe, marking / highlighting the search string in the search results takes most performance - but the bulk is still the browser applying HTML and CSS and calculating / rendering the final layout.

Subsequent searches

Unfortunately, I accidentally broke the debug: true option, which would give you some easier to read performance measurements right into the console + some additional marking in the performance view. I've fixed it already, but it's not yet released.

[Fannon]

@s0j0urn : For the meantime, I'm adding an example configuration that contains typical options that can help with performance.

See here: https://github.com/Fannon/search-bookmarks-history-and-tabs/pull/103/files#diff-b335630551682c19a781afebcf4d07bf978fb1f8ac04c6bf87428ed5106870f5R100-R114

[s0j0urn]

@Fannon I tried the steps you suggested however I was unable to reproduce the performance issue today. Sorry about that. If I'll face it again, I'll record and share. Certainly, the steps are helpful.

Also, searching inside a specific folder is a useful use case for me. If that can be implemented somehow, it will be great.

[Fannon]

Ok, but glad to hear that the issues are resolved. Then it was very likely unrelated to the extension itself.

Yes, I'll think about how to make searching within a bookmark folder possible. I'll keep you updated here.

[Fannon]

I've started working on this in PR #104 .

The solution doesn't feel completely optimal, because you need to separate the Folder name or tag name with two spaces. But one space alone doesn't work, because folder names or tag names may contain spaces themself. In that situation separating by a space would be ambigous.

It's also possible to use TAB to enter two spaces, that may make it more comfortable.

If you browse tags or folders and click on them, it pre-adds the two spaces so you can immediately search.