Bookmarks and history

A bookmark in Savoia is three things at once: a row in a list, a readable copy of the page as a file on disk, and a place in an index that finds it by what it was about rather than by its title.

⌘D	bookmark the focused page (again: remove it)
the star beside the address field	the same; filled when the page is saved
⌘⌥B	the list, and the search across it

What is saved

Not an address — the page. Savoia pulls the main content out of it (headings, paragraphs, lists, quotes, code, links, tables, large images) and writes a Markdown file beside the row, in Profiles/<name>/Bookmarks/. Navigation, sidebars, footers, forms, cookie notices and anything calling itself comments or a newsletter are dropped.

So what you saved is readable a year later, and without the site. The file starts with the title, address, site, language, profile and date — enough to rebuild the row if the database is ever lost. Removing the bookmark removes the file.

Search by meaning

⌘⌥B searches not the letters of a title but what the page was about. Under each hit is the passage that matched.

It works across languages: a Russian question finds an English page and the other way round. The model behind it (~470 MB) is downloaded once on first use and never leaves the machine afterwards; while it comes in, the bookmarks window’s footer says so. Search by title works from the first second, waiting for nothing. Once the model is on the machine it is loaded as soon as the window opens — while you are still typing the first question — so the first search of a session is as quick as the rest. Opening a window never fetches it; only a search does.

What is honest to say about the quality

Within one language the ranking is right. Across languages it is right for topics and shaky for details: an English question about a number in a Russian paragraph can lose to an unrelated English page.

↑ ↓ walk the rows straight from the search field, ↩ opens the selected one in a new window, ⌘⌫ removes the bookmark and its file, Esc closes. The context menu has Show File in Finder.

Which model

Savoia picks one for your Mac and says which: Configuration ▸ General ▸ Bookmarks ▸ Search Model. Below 16 GB of memory the recommendation is Compact — 465 MB, above it Standard — 1.1 GB; the recommended one is marked in the list. The other is yours to take, at your own risk — larger ranks a little better between languages, but downloads twice as much and keeps twice as much memory busy for as long as Savoia runs, and on a small Mac it is the open pages that pay for that.

Changing the model re-indexes: every saved page is embedded again by the new one. Search by meaning goes quiet while that happens — the pages themselves are not going anywhere — and the footer of the bookmarks window says how far it has got.

Text and pictures

The third model in the same list is Text and Pictures — 1.5 GB (Google’s EmbeddingGemma 2). It ranks better than both and finds a page in another language best of all, and it understands pictures: “a map of the empire” or “a bowl of red soup” finds the bookmark with such a picture in it even when its text never says so. Each page’s pictures are downloaded once and kept beside its copy.

The price is time and memory: a page takes dozens of times longer to index than with the compact model, and the model holds about 0.5 GB of memory, plus ~0.3 GB once it gets to pictures. That is why Savoia offers it rather than recommends it.

On a modest Mac, better not choose it. With 8 GB of memory or an early base chip, a hundred bookmarks take hours to index, the GPU is busy all that time and the memory comes out of the open pages — the Mac slows down noticeably. It wants 16 GB at least; below that, stay with the compact model.

While this model is chosen, the list is followed by Search Pictures (on) and Pictures per Page — 5, 10 or 20. Turn the switch off and search goes back to text alone; like a change of model, that re-indexes the bookmarks. A new number of pictures applies to pages indexed after the change.

Without being asked

The same search runs where you are not searching for anything — under the start page’s field. As you type, up to two of your saved pages stand above the engine’s completions, when they are about it. There is nothing to switch on: with bookmarks the rows appear, without them nothing does, and the model is not downloaded for it.

A private window has none of them.

Pages change

Bookmarks are re-read on a schedule: Bookmarks ▸ Re-read Saved Pages — never / daily / weekly (the default) / monthly. It happens in the background, one page at a time, with the profile’s cookies — so a page behind a login is read as you see it.

If the text has not changed, only the date is stamped. If it has, the file and the index are rewritten. If the page will not load, the old copy stays and an orange arrow appears on the row with the reason.

Refresh Bookmark and Refresh <profile> Bookmarks do the same on demand.

What the assistant and the agents see

Bookmarks ▸ Search In: This Profile / All Profiles is one setting for all of it: it decides whose bookmarks the ⌘E assistant and the agents look in when nothing says otherwise. They can list bookmarks, search them by meaning, read a saved file whole, add, refresh and remove one.

The agents’ working directory is deliberately not the bookmarks folder: a question about something saved should go through the search rather than through a grep over the working directory.