Efficient Research With Web Highlights
Just like you do on books, highlight on any web page or PDF, and take notes. Organize with tags and find your research in the app.
Tired of browsing your history to find the information you saw yesterday?
You may be used to highlight physical text in articles, books, or magazines. You might also be familiar with highlighting PDFs and may use the Kindle highlighter or the one here on Medium. For me, the problem always was that those tools do not store my research in a single point of truth.
I started to look for Chrome extensions to solve my problem. There are several ones out there. But none that works as I imagined. I wanted a tool that enables me to easily re-find everything I read at some point on the web. That is why I started developing my own Chrome extension — Web Highlights.
How does Web Highlights work?
While you may be familiar with highlighting text on word documents or PDFs, Web Highlights allows you to highlight directly on websites and PDFs. When selecting some text, a popup to highlight it will appear. Alternatively, you can also highlight by right-clicking your selected text. You can also enable and disable the popup and the sidebar widget in the chrome extension's settings.
Besides websites and online PDFs, you can also highlight local PDFs on your computer. Web Highlights will save all your highlights in the Chrome extension and sync them to the corresponding web app so you can access them from anywhere.
Tags for better organization
A tagging functionality was critical for me. For instance, when I read a good quote about productivity, I want to tag it with ‘quote’ and ‘productivity’ to easily re-find it at any time.
By providing tags, I can easily re-find my research anytime in the extension sidebar or corresponding web app on web-highlights.com. Additionally, I can see different tags created in the same context for other highlights.
Highlight PDFs online and on your computer
With Web Highlights, you can not only highlight online websites and online PDFs, but you can also highlight local PDFs on your computer.
Share your research with others
Web Highlights is straightforward to share your research with co-workers or friends. On every page with highlights, you can create a shareable link, and everyone with the link can see your highlights and tags.
You can see the shared link, which is in the video here. Furthermore, you can discover shared highlights, articles, and notes from users on any topic on the Explore page.
Create bookmarks
There might be times when you simply want to save a page as a bookmark without highlighting text. Sure, every modern browser includes a bookmark functionality. But, what if you are on the move without your computer? Storing your bookmarks with Web Highlights and tagging them makes it easy to find any website you need to re-visit. Simply click the green bookmark icon in the sidebar, and Web Highlights will sync it to the web app.
Copy to Markdown and export to Notion
Once you finished your research, many want to store their online highlights and tags in a centralized tool like Notion, Obsidian, or any other that supports the Markdown language.
Synchronizing your research to such tools is straightforward. You can simply visit your highlights in the web app and click "Copy Markdown" in the menu of your highlighted page or pdf:
Afterward, you can paste the markdown to the software of your choice. For example, here is how it would look like in Notion:
Final Thoughts
The Web Highlights Chrome extension is a great tool to make your research more efficient and organized. You can easily re-find everything in the web app on web-highlights.com. So, what are you waiting for? Get started and install the Chrome extension here.
About the Author
I am a Software Engineering Analyst at Accenture Interactive. What drives me the most is my urge to create something that has the potential to be helpful and life-changing for others.
I write about Side-Projects, Typescript, Web Components, and many more topics. Check out my Blog on Medium.