Personal Bookmarking using YACY & yacy-it

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A recent post on HackerNews titled Ask HN: Does anybody still use bookmarking services? caught my attention. Specifically, the top response which mentioned a distributed Search Engine YACY.

The author of the post mentions how, he has configured it to be a standalone personal search engine. The workflow is something like this:

  1. Browse the web
  2. Come across an interesting link that you need to bookmark
  3. Add the URL to the YACY Crawler and crawl to the depth=0, which crawls just that page and indexes it.
  4. Next time you need it, just search for any word that might be present on the page.

This is brilliant, because, I don’t have to spend time putting it the right folder (like in browser bookmark) or tagging it with right keywords (as I do in Notion collections). The full text indexing takes care of this automatically.

But, I do have to spend time adding the URL to the YACY Crawler. The user actions are:

  • I have to open http://localhost:8090/CrawlStartSite.html
  • Copy the URL of the page I need to bookmark
  • Paste it in the Crawling page and start the crawler
  • Close the Tab.

Now, this is high friction. The mental load saved by not tagging a bookmark is easily eaten away by doing all of the above.

yacy-it

Since I like the YACY functionality so much, I decided I will reduce the friction by writing a Firefox Browser Extension - https://github.com/tecoholic/yacy-it

This extension uses the YACY API to start crawling of the current tab’s URL which I click the extension’s icon next to the address bar.

Note: If you notice error messages when using the addon, you might have to configure YaCy for CORS headers as described here https://github.com/tecoholic/yacy-it#configuring-yacy

Add pages to YaCy index directly from the address bar

Right-click on a Link and add it to YaCy Index

If you running YaCy on the cloud or in a different computer on the network, set it in the Extension Preferences

Tip - Search your bookmarks directly from the address bar

You can search through YaCy indexed links from your addressbar by added the YaCy as a search engine in Firefox as describe here => https://community.searchlab.eu/t/adding-yacy-to-firefox-search-menue/95

  1. Go to Setting/Preferences => Search and select “Add search bar in toolbar”
  2. Now Go to the YaCy homepage at http://localhost:8090
  3. Click the “Lens” icon to open the list of search engines
  4. This should now show the YaCy icon with a tiny + icon. Click that to add it as a search engine.
  5. Go back to search settings and select “Use the address bar for search and navigation” to hide the search box
  6. Scroll down to Search shortcuts -> double click the Keyword column next to the Yacy and enter a keyword eg., @yacy or @bm
  7. Now you can search Yacy from the address bar like @yacy <keyword> or @bm <keyword> to look through your bookmarks.