Is there a workaround for Google Bookmark search problems?

Question

I'm not sure if anyone else has come across this, but I'm getting incomplete results when searching my Google Bookmarks (not Chrome bookmarks). I have a link with the title including "headlights" tagged with multiple labels, one of them being "phoenix". If I search:

label:phoenix headlights

it shows up as expected. But if I search only:

headlights

it doesn't show up as either of the two results presented. This is just one example of multiple I've seen.

Is there any way to work around this?

Answer 1

I just finally figured this out: bookmarks that are imported from delicious aren't indexed correctly. If you edit a bookmark and re-save it (even without changes) they start showing up in all results. The downside is that it changes the date you saved it, if that's important to you.

When I have time, I'm going to see if there's a programmatic way to update them through the API without changing the dates. Using the GBookmark Android app, which uses the API, I just confirmed editing a bookmark there makes missing ones show up in search results in the web interface.

The biggest reason to do it via the API would actually be so I don't have to manually edit the thousands of bookmarks that I imported years ago. If I end up building something, I'll post a link here.

Answer 2

I am having similar problems searching labels in "Google Bookmark", from Chrome (not using local Chrome bookmarks, just the raw "Google Bookmark") but the labels were all typed in manually, not imported: e.g., label - ttsapp Senior (Judicial) Appointments
When I click on it, it works (brings up the underlying entry) When I search on
label:"ttsapp Senior (Judicial) Appointments" it works too. But when I search on ttsapp it does not work, finds nothing. But when I re-save it (with no changes at all) then it DOES start finding ttsapp again. The funny thing is that this ability to search on a leading word in the label works for a while then suddenly disappears. Is re-saving the only way to fix it? If I could just run some kind of process to refresh all my bookmarks when this starts happening then that would be a great improvement. But the question is WHY does it happen? Is all the action on the Google servers, or is there a local cache in Windows somewhere that needs flushing? This is a real killer: how can you use something that is simply unreliable? If I can't find a fix then I will have to find another bookmarker.

I just tried changing a bookmark (randomly chosen) in Gbookmarks on my Android phone, to fix another label with the same problem, and it made no difference unless the label I re-saved was the actual one in question - then it did work, but then I could have simply re-saved it in Chrome, so no gain.