Falcon is a brand new browser extension for Google Chrome that adds full-text history search capabilities to the web browser.
Chrome by default matches titles or urls to what you type in its address bar, and displays what it considers the best matches for your query as suggestions.
Falcon changes the default behavior by adding an option to Chrome that matches text found on web pages you visited in the past as well.
The extension adds its own keyword search to Chrome which you need to use it you want to use its text-search capabilities.
Basically, what you do is type f and then hit the Tab-key to launch the search interface. From there, it is just about entering the query you want results for.
Falcon: full-text history search for Chrome
The extension highlights matches that it found on pages with its own icon so that it is easy enough to distinguish them from other results.
The main advantage of Falcon over Chrome’s default way of returning results is that it may provide you with better results.
If the title or URL of a page don’t contain the keyword you entered in the address bar, it won’t be displayed by Chrome as a suggestion even if the page is full of that keyword. With Falcon, that page may be returned as well in the suggestions.
You may click on the Falcon icon to load preferences and the history of pages that the extension indexed fully.
The preferences allow you to blacklist certain sites from being indexed. It needs to be noted that Falcon will index all sites that is not blacklisted. You may block the indexing of all https sites by adding a new blacklist entry to Falcon’s configuration.
Simply hit the add button, type https as the website, and select regex as the type. Click on save afterwards.
You can verify that this works by visiting https sites afterwards and reloading the Falcon preferences page. Sites that use the https protocol should not appear in the Falcon history.
The history enables you to delete entries that the extension indexed. You may also delete all entries, for instance after a browsing session.
There is however no option to delete the data on exit or after a certain time period. All data is stored locally and not remotely.
Falcon is not the first extension to add full-text search capabilities to Chrome. We reviewed All Seeing Eye for Chrome back in 2014 which added the same capability to Chrome’s history page.
Closing Words
Depending on how you use Google Chrome, Falcon may be quite the useful extension. If you happen to run into issues finding sites that you visited in the past using Chrome’s own suggestions system, you may want to give Falcon a try to improve that.
While you have to tap on f and then tab to use Falcon, it should not be much of an issue after a while.