Pinboard.in is a bookmarking and archival website run by Maciej Ceglowski, also a noted public speaker, Antarctic explorer and political activist. I use Pinboard as a way to close browser tabs, by pretending to myself that I’ll one day revisit the 11,000 interesting links that I’ve bookmarked.
Hoping to make better use of this expansive set of thought-provoking articles, hilarious videos and expired domain names, I wrote a minimal search provider for GNOME Shell.
If you’re happy to meson install some Python scripts, then you can use it too! The search provider installs a systemd timer unit which checks for new bookmarks every hour, and downloads them into a Whoosh search index. I chose Whoosh because it’s fun to try new search engines, and my opinion is that it’s fast, powerful, and a little heavy on the disk space usage — my bookmarks take up 7MB in a JSON file but 17MB in the Whoosh index.
A secondary purpose of this effort is to show how easy it is to make search providers. It took me about 8 hours to make this. Feel free to copy and paste for your own search providers, and use the CLI test tool in my desktop-search repo when testing them.
What other services would you like to see integrated into GNOME Shell as search providers? Next on my list might be notes from Joplin.
Sam Thursfield 
Hi,
A search provider for computers I can connect to with NoMachine would be really nice !
When I saw you ask for ideas, I was sure I had loads before, but can’t seem to remember them now
Cheers
Stuart
Interesting. Search provider for Kiwix (offline wikipedia/stackexchange dumps) which come with their own indexes, would be cool. Also for Zeal Docsets (offline coding docs)!
Those are interesting projects! Thanks for the pointers.