Forget what you read? Breadcrumb helps

Announcement Open source Chrome extension Productivity Artificial Intelligence

Published: July 5, 2026

You read a great article about Kubernetes autoscaling in March. In July you remember the idea, but not the URL, the title, or even the exact words. You try Google again and hope you find the same page. Developers, students, and researchers hit this constantly: valuable knowledge disappears into browser history.

Breadcrumb is a free, open-source Google Chrome extension I built to fix that. Highlight text on any page, save it in one click, and find it again months later with plain-language search. Everything stays on your device. No account, no cloud upload.

Install from the Chrome Web Store · Source on GitHub

Who is it for?

Developers saving AWS docs, GitHub issues, Stack Overflow answers, blog posts
Students and researchers collecting notes across papers, courses, and articles
AI power users keeping insights from ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini that would otherwise vanish

Breadcrumb does not try to change how you work. It captures value from what you already do: read, research, learn.

How to use it

1. Save a highlight

Select text on any page. Right-click and choose Save to Breadcrumb. The extension stores the text, page title, link, and timestamp locally.

Save to Breadcrumb from the right-click menu — Save a highlight from the right-click menu

Click the Breadcrumb icon in your toolbar. Recent saves appear immediately. Search from here, or click Open library for the full view.

Turn on Semantic (AI) search in settings if you want meaning-based search, not just keywords. The AI runs on your device via Transformers.js. Nothing is uploaded.

3. Search your library

In the library, type what you remember, like aws or kubernetes autoscaling. Breadcrumb finds matching notes even when you do not recall the exact words. Use filters, tags, and the timeline on the right to see what you have been learning over time.

Search results in the Breadcrumb library — Search results in the library

That's it. Highlight, save, search. Your notes stay in your browser only.

What makes it different

Hybrid search blends keyword matching with semantic similarity in one ranked list
On-device AI using a small all-MiniLM-L6-v2 model. Works offline. No inference server
Similar notes shown when you save something related to an earlier highlight
Learning timeline with month-by-month breakdown and auto topic tags (AWS, Kubernetes, AI, Rust, and more)
Export and delete your data as JSON anytime

Privacy and permissions

Breadcrumb requests only storage, contextMenus, and activeTab. No host permissions, no browsing history tracking, no backend. Notes live in IndexedDB on your machine.

Open source

The project is MIT licensed. Built with WXT, TypeScript, Vitest, and GitHub Actions CI. Full tutorial: tutorial on GitHub.

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