autocompletion of Labels in Google Bookmarks

[greg heil]

Autocompletion of labels stopped ... about a week ago. It has affected all the machines i have tried -- all using Chrome, about 3 of them (each with differing extensions) including a ChromeBook.

What happened?

[Andrew]

I am seeing the same, for the last few days. In Chrome Developer console there are no errors so it looks as though something has disappeared.

[greg heil]

@andrew.stott

Potentially very bad news!-(
Made me realize how much i depend on that functionality.
Know of any usable replacements?
Perhaps there are other, unaffected, Google domains ...?

~greg

--

from: Andrew <andrew...@gmail.com>
reply-to: google-b...@googlegroups.com
to: Google Bookmarks <google-b...@googlegroups.com>
date: 14 June 2018 at 14:38
subject: Re: autocompletion of Labels in Google Bookmarks

>I am seeing the same, for the last few days. In Chrome Developer console there are no errors so it looks as though something has disappeared.

--

from: greg heil <emanu...@gmail.com>
reply-to: google-b...@googlegroups.com
to: Google Bookmarks <google-b...@googlegroups.com>
date: 13 June 2018 at 13:42
subject: autocompletion of Labels in Google Bookmarks

[Andrew]

@greg

I depend on Google Bookmarks too. But Google are no longer developing it - perhaps because it did not provide as useful as they thought for search purposes - and now it does not seem to be maintained as well as other Google products. There are problems from time to time with the service and the recent loss of auto-completion seems to be one of these. 

I have looked for alternatives but service-based ones tend to emphasise social and public bookmarking and though there are open-source software products they require a server and do not seem to be being actively developed or supported (Scuttle https://github.com/scronide/scuttle seemed a possibility, but it has not been updated for 8 years and would need a thorough code review).. If you find one that works for you, please post your review here!

[Andrew]

@greg

BTW I take periodic dumps of my bookmarks - I have several thousand - in case the service disappears altogether. The URL to get a dump to XML (which I saw on this group a long time ago) is

https://www.google.com/bookmarks/?output=xml&num=10000

(you'll have to adjust the num parameter if you have more than 10,000 bookmarks of course ;-) )

[greg heil]

Andrew

That is deeply troubling, in many ways.
First the output does not retrieve the "notes" tag of the XML. So in a
sense it is neutered. That it does get the label(s) tag though is
fantastic, much better than i expected!

Also the num= part of the URL seems to be a placebo, ie unused. Any
"small" setting, none the less gets all.

There seems to be some additional parameters available
(
which were obtained through searches such as
site:google.com/bookmarks/ "output=xml"
site:google.com/bookmarks/ "output=xml" "q="
):
sort=title,date
start=0,10... for result #
zx=652 meaning unknown
q=alz,Focus,Relentless%20Pace....
limit=5 meaning unknown
output=xml,rss

i have yet to find an alternative to "output=xml" that returns
anything other that the XML or the regular HTML view. Eg not csv...

WRONG: it seems "output=rss" is a real breakthrough, as it includes a
tag called <smh:bkmk_annotation> which has the "notes".

HOWEVER this may not be all, as it only takes about 2x the room on my
disk as the note-less output=xml did:-(

SO there is still to be found a URL that gets ALL the bookmarks with
ALL the tags.

"sort=title" seems to sorta work. Others such as "sort=url" seem also
non efficacious.

So far the only effective numerical limitation i have found are
"start=", limit, zx, num,... seem useless

But there is much experimentation and searching (googling:-) to be done.

Back to the "autocompletion" theme. i too looked at the Developer
console and zeroed in to the "labels" box. The TD for that entry says:
<input id="bkmk_label_0" name="labels" autocomplete="off" type="text"
style="width:400px" class="kd-textbox" value="mitophagy, ">

This is pretty ominous. Do you know of a way to turn it back on?
Perhaps through some javascripting bookmarklet?

i normally interact with gBM's through a Bookmarklet:

<javascript:(function(){var%20a=window,b=document,c=encodeURIComponent,d=a.open("http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&output=popup&bkmk="+c(b.location)+"&title="+c(b.title),"bkmk_popup","left="+((a.screenX||a.screenLeft)+10)+",top="+((a.screenY||a.screenTop)+10)+",height=420px,width=550px,resizable=1,alwaysRaised=1");a.setTimeout(function(){d.focus()},300)})();>

There appears to be an issue tracker:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=849273
The issue seems hoary and relates back to the 2012 thread:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=126308
and from what i can see it is not an issue with Chrome perse, but
maybe with Bookmarks...

Maybe someone can run the Bookmarklet in another browser? Safari, FF etc.

~greg
http://krsnadas.org

--

from: Andrew <andrew...@gmail.com>
to: Google Bookmarks <google-b...@googlegroups.com>
date: 17 June 2018 at 07:12

subject: Re: autocompletion of Labels in Google Bookmarks

[Andrew]

@greg

Excellent work well done - but it does bring out the neglected aspect of Google Bookmarks.

I hardly ever use the Notes feature, so I had not noticed that they were missing from the XML. So the RSS is a good find.

The "autocomplete=off" is an instruction to the *browser* not to use its in-built autocompletion functionality. That's sensible, because the autocompletion we want actually seems supplied by Ajax calls back to the Google Bookmarks system. (Sometimes in the past it has seemed slow on initial startup.) If the browser also tried to automcomplete there would be a mess. In any case, changing the "autocomplete=off" to "autocomplete=on" using Chrome developer tools makes no difference.

The Chromium bug system is intended for Chrome Bookmarks - which are completely separate from Google Bookmarks. I doubt whether Chromium developers feel that it is their place even to forward Google Bookmark reports.

Incidentally I tried my (historically working) Google Bookmarks bookmarklet in Firefox and I did not get autocompletion there either. That probably eliminates the possibility that the cause is something changing in a recent release of Chrome and suggests that the fault is indeed in Google Bookmarks itself.

I also tried turning off some Chrome extensions (eg Ad Blocker) that could have interfered with the Google Bookmark window; that made no difference either.

[greg heil]

This issue is in practise solvable as @volopoglod said:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/chrome/_KSjbSpQ0kc/8CCE4iJ1BAAJ

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/chrome/_KSjbSpQ0kc/UEgmFp14BAAJ

>His workaround is a bit impractical ATM but it is easy to see it still "sorta" works: just hit CR after typing a few letters and the autocomplete will be done... not the menu, just the first hit. But it is progress. Someone at Google may be working on it.

~greg
http://krsnadas.org

[greg heil]

i Forked @molhanec's great Gist:

https://gist.github.com/emanuensis/581f559e15633a2a993dd7164b3ba18e

The goals of the fork were several:

1) Allow the use of the keyboard for exiting the Bookmarklet ... so
everything can be done from the KB. One does this by including a
semicolon (";") in a tag stub.

2)Allow one to scan through a long list of "suggestions" using ['s for
forward and ]' to backup. The increment is to the next "type" of
suggestion...

3) Expand the covered types to include:

a) Exact case of term at the beginning of suggestion
b) " at beginning of words
c) " "... separated by underscores "_"
d) " "... separated by dashes "-"
e) CamelCase'd term in suggestions
f) Starts with lowercase version of term
g) Exact match anywhere
h) includes lowercase version of term

If one does not want (ie does not use) these suggestions one can just
remove that section of the script:)

Working on this i got some interesting ideas for extensions ... which
however will be rather more elaborate and perhaps justify a whole new
html page rather that Googles BM one.

Basically they involve whole new ways of finding BM's: 1) similar to
others used in previous BM's by the author 2) words taken from the
annotation...

i will likely work on this as a separated project in the Github, and
would appreciate ideas or contributions!

~greg

[skissh]

Greg how do I use the js that you posted the link to.  I use FF and have a bookmark bar bookmark that has as it's Location something that starts like this:

javascript:(function(){var%20a=window,b=document,c=encodeURIComponent,d=a.open("https://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&output=popup&bkmk= ...

Is this a bookmarklet? How do I connect this with your js?

[greg heil]

>Sorry it is a Tampermonkey script, which has to be installed. TM is very hoary though, so likely there is a FF version or someone has filled the Gap which started with GreaseMonkey (i use Chrome mostly and have yet to look for a FF version). Once that is installed one should be able to just click the "download" button on the Gist.

greg

--

from: skissh <smk...@gmail.com>
to: Google Bookmarks <google-b...@googlegroups.com>
date: 27 July 2018 at 14:07

[skissh]

Thanks for the response. I'll look into it.

steve

On Fri, Jul 27, 2018 at 2:36 PM, greg heil <emanu...@gmail.com> wrote:

>Sorry it is a Tampermonkey script, which has to be installed. TM is very hoary though, so likely there is a FF version or someone has filled the Gap which started with GreaseMonkey (i use Chrome mostly and have yet to look for a FF version). Once that is installed one should be able to just click the "download" button on the Gist.

greg

--

from: skissh <smk...@gmail.com>

to: Google Bookmarks <google-bookmarks@googlegroups.com>

date: 27 July 2018 at 14:07

>Greg how do I use the js that you posted the link to.  I use FF and have a bookmark bar bookmark that has as it's Location something that starts like this:
javascript:(function(){var%20a=window,b=document,c=encodeURIComponent,d=a.open("https://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&output=popup&bkmk=
...
Is this a bookmarklet? How do I connect this with your js?

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[Alex Nguyen]

Another downside is that we're no longer warned about bookmarks we already added.

[greg heil]

Alex

>Been long enough maybe we should not depend on Google. The Tampermonkey scripts do fix it and allow many autocompletion extensions for you to take charge of:)

~greg
http://krsnadas.org

--

from: Alex Nguyen <nguye...@gmail.com>
to: Google Bookmarks <google-b...@googlegroups.com>
date: Sep 17, 2018, 5:08 AM

subject: Re: autocompletion of Labels in Google Bookmarks

[Alex Nguyen]

>> Tampermonkey

Works for me.

[Andrew]

@greg

 

Thanks again for your work on autocompletion.

 

Today I decided to take a further back-up of my Google Bookmarks using "https://www.google.com/bookmarks/?output=xml&num=10000" - but thinking that I might now have more than 10,000 bookmarks I set num=100000. 

 

The returned XML file had exactly 10,000 <bookmark> elements in it. (A previous backup of mid-2018 had around 8,600).

 

Setting num=100 also returned the same file with 10,000 <bookmark> elements. So the ‘num=’ element of the query is ignored, and it returns all the bookmarks currently held up to 10,000.

 

The HTML file from the "Export Bookmarks" link on www.google.com/bookmarks also had exactly 10,000 underlying bookmarks in it, but the HTML format is grouped round individual labels and URLs with multiple labels appear multiple times so there were something like 17,000 URLs in the file returned, but after extracting the URLs and doing a sort | uniq | wc -l I found exactly 10,000 unique URLs.

 

I tried adding a few extra bookmarks and re-running both export functions. Again exactly 10,000 bookmarks were returned - and the 'new' bookmarks were top of the file on the XML file. 

 

I then deleted those extra bookmarks and re-ran both export functions. Now the number of bookmarks was 9,996 and the deleted bookmarks were no longer at the top of the file.

 

So it appears that, rather than the num= parameter being forced to 10,000, there is instead a hard limit of 10,000 on the number of bookmarks stored. Once that limit is reached an existing bookmark is deleted each time a new bookmark is added. 

 

It’s not immediately clear how Google Bookmarks selects the existing bookmark to delete – from an initial analysis of bookmarks that have disappeared from the previous backup it is *not* the oldest.

 

 

 

 

[greg heil]

@Andrew

> > The HTML file from the "Export Bookmarks" link on www.google.com/bookmarks

That link seems like
an unlimited (or limited to 10K?) version of
https://www.google.com/bookmarks/lookup?sort=label&start=0&output=html
try
https://www.google.com/bookmarks/lookup?sort=label&start=2&output=html
it should start 3 down... or
https://www.google.com/bookmarks/lookup?sort=label&start=2000&output=html
should start 2003 down.

>Note that this output=html gives an instance for EVERY label in the bookmark. Eg if the BM has 3 labels the BM will occur 3 times in the output ... it is up to the user to collate the duplicates and attach all the relevant labels.
>In contrast
https://www.google.com/bookmarks/lookup?sort=label&start=2000&output=rss
>gives ALL the smh:bkmk_label's starting at the 2003rd and going for one page... but i see no way to make it continuous, other than by programmatically iterating... up to 4314 in my case. Nor do i know for sure that there are no duplicates.

>Nor do i see any of doing a "partial" deletion .... eg just the 5K oldest, and well backed up.

>Note that the URL
https://www.google.com/bookmarks/lookup?sort=label&start=2000&output=opml
>gives a page of the regular output with all the labels.... but duplicated for each label, and only in short "pages"

Google really has not made it convenient to extract all of ones BM's,
unduplicated. AFAICT.

~greg
krsnadas.org

--

from:Andrew <andrew...@gmail.com>
reply-to:google-b...@googlegroups.com

to:Google Bookmarks <google-b...@googlegroups.com>
date:Apr 3, 2019, 11:51 AM
subject:Limit on the number of bookmarks stored in Google Bookmarks