Ryan Mendieta

This is an idea I have to make research more productive and organized. I have done many google searches and have not seen it yet. Perhaps the demand is not large, nonetheless, this is what I want.

When I am doing research, I want the final page that I am interested in, plus its metadata. What I mean by that is, that I want to know the seed for that fruit. I want to know what search query produced it. I want to know the pages that I visited on my way to finding it, if any. I want the metadata of the page: what date and time I visited.

I want to right click the page, click export origin path, and have a pop up box. In that pop up box, I want to enter some text saying why I found it useful, and what part of my research it pertains to. I want to categorize this page, or tag it, so that it fits in nicely with my paper layout. Perhaps I could import my paper layout beforehand.

Currently on the default Chrome and Firefox history pages, I can manually right click each link and save it, then manually enter the metadata. This is tedious and disrupts my workflow.

Also on the Chrome history page are checkboxes. There are buttons at the top to Clear or remove all items. A simple first step would be to just add a box that says Copy. This copy command would copy the links, separate them by line, and then be pasted into my document. I would be happy with that.

And a possible first step in accomplishing the proposed automated task would be that, once a user has decided that they would like to keep the history of the page, the function would look back and find the first instance of a search query string. So, I had searched with google, the string would be something like google.com/?sa=. Find the title, date, and time of that query, and move forward from there. I’m sure most websites have some pattern in their search strings.

I believe I had read something about history access pertaining to Chrome being needlessly difficult to access, but perhaps there could be a roundabout way of doing it, maybe scripting a button press to the history page, then scraping the page.

I want to make this, or hope that someone else will.