As with many of you I was shocked by Yahoo’s recent decision to begin closing Delicious. Having used Delicious for years I was now left searching for a replacement online bookmark service.

Not looking too far I decided to even further consolidate my online persona by importing my precious bookmarks in to Google Bookmarks. Unfortunately like the majority of Google’s services whilst reliable and functionally sound the UI sucks and it looks like it was designed 20 years ago by an engineer. The biggest functionality I missed almost immediately was the fact that the search function focused more on a plain text search through your bookmark’s names rather than tags (or as Google calls them, labels). All of your labels are listed on the left hand side and are clickable to perform a search on them but I’ve become used to being prompted when typing in the search field a selection of tags I may be looking for. Hence my first published Safari Extension is born, the “Google Bookmarks Autocomplete” extension.

The extension will prompt you with label matches based upon what you’re typing within the search box. Selecting one will automatically complete the search field along with Google’s required keyword to indicate you’re doing a label search. (ie. label:”label name”). You can then continue to type and be prompted with more labels or simply enter any text to further refine your criteria for results.

I have submitted it to Apple’s extension gallery or you can download the extension by clicking here.