There are times when you would just like to look back into the past. That's true about our browsing sessions as well. That forgotten life hack. The great website you failed to favorite. Or just a "tip of my tongue" bit of trivia that slipped away.

And it's even worse when you try to search your browser's history only to realize that you recently cleared the history cache.

That won't be a problem anymore with History Search. With this extension, you can search through your browsing histories on Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, and Safari. Just download the right extension for your browser.

History Search stores all browsing activity on a secure cloud account.

Do a full-content search of the pages you browse. Unlike Google's Search History, you can do a text search of the entire webpage (or site) with History Search. It can store up to 3,000 complete webpages from your browsing history and content from your favorite 50 websites.

But let's say you don't want to register a central cloud account. You can continue unregistered with the facility to search across 500 webpages.

There is also a Premium version of the cloud service, which keeps more than 15,000 webpages and 1,000 favorites websites. There are some excellent features too, like the ability to sync 10 browsers to the cloud. But let's stick to the free version for now.

Here's how it works:

  1. Install the extension for your specific browser.
  2. Sign up for free from the extension or continue unregistered if your history search needs are low.
  3. Use keywords to do a full content text search. Search with any word, phrase, or sentence you remember.
  4. You can also use Google to find those pages again. History Search activates In Google results that lets you search history and Google simultaneously.
  5. Sort by List or Domain to view results in a neat list or grouped by domain.

History Search is a useful solution for researchers who do concentrated bursts of search and need to jump in and out of webpages. But the free version could also appeal to casual users who hate deleting browsing sessions for fear of losing something.

However, the curation of browsing histories is a sensitive privacy topic. History Search has a security policy in place with industry-standard encryption to secure your data, but the risks are still there. Weigh utility against risk on your own personal scale before using this extension.

Does History Search fill a need for your online research?