I stopped drowning in browser tabs, thanks to this clever AI tool

Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.

---

ZDNET’s key takeaways

• AI tagging turned my messy bookmark pile into a searchable archive.
• Karakeep rules automatically sort YouTube videos by topic.
• A homelab server powers my knowledge library, and there’s a cloud option.

---

Tabulomania. Navigatio compulsiva. Hypertabulosis. Cognitiva tabula retention disorder (CTRD). Informationes retentio compulsiva.

This is too good. I asked ChatGPT for the name of the medical or psychological condition where you keep too many tabs open. When it replied there was no such condition, I asked it, “What if there were?” It replied with the names above.

Also:Chrome on Android just got two huge upgrades that can fix your messy tabs – what’s new

I think it’s a tie between CTRD and tabulomania. Whatever you call it, did you know there’s a cure? In this article, I’m going to tell you all about it.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

Meet Karakeep

I’m still peeved about Pocket shutting down, but I’ve found a much better solution that works a lot better. It’s one that I can control. So can you. It’s called Karakeep. It used to be called Hoarder, until someone figured out that hoarding is a documented DSM-IV condition.

If you suffer from tabulomania, Karakeep and its AI features can probably help out. Yes, this is an AI-adjacent solution. Karakeep generates keywords and summaries using AI API calls. It works shockingly well, as I’ll show you.

Also:Why I started using Tor Browser on Android instead of Chrome – and why you should, too

You can use Karakeep either in the cloud or self-hosted on your own server. The cloud implementation will be easier to set up. Karakeep lets you try it out with up to 10 bookmarks, but you don’t get any AI features until you sign up for the $4-per-month Pro plan. That lets you store up to 50,000 articles (the product calls them bookmarks) and comes with 50GB of storage.

There is a demo you can try without signing up to anything. Point your browser to https://try.karakeep.app. Log in using demo@karakeep.app with the password demodemo. It’s populated with sample data and is read-only because people will be people.

After losing all my saved Pocket articles to some faceless cloud operator last year, I decided to set up Karakeep on my own server. You can run it as a Docker container on any device running Docker, including Windows, Mac, and Linux. The self-hosted version of Karakeep is free and open source, although you will have to pay a few bucks to your favorite AI provider for smart features.

Since I have an old Mac mini converted to a Linux-based homelab Docker server, that’s where I set mine up. If you’re not familiar with Docker and how to install it, or how to install Linux, or how to convert an old Mac to Linux, ZDNET’s Jack Wallen has you covered.

Also:I’ve used nearly every browser out there, and these are my top 4 (spoiler: Chrome is out)

Docker is a container service. Basically, it’s like a virtual machine (VM), but without the machine. When you set up a VM, you’re configuring an entire computer emulator and an entire operating system install. So if you’re running a bunch of VMs, you have a lot of overhead (and potentially OS licenses) to deal with.

A container service like Docker just adds the application-specific layer on top of any other operating system. You can run the same Docker container on a Linux box, a Mac box, or a Windows PC, and it will generally be happy. I’ve been using Docker and Karakeep on an old 2012 Intel Mac mini. It has had no performance issues whatsoever.

Basic bookmarking and archiving

At its most basic, Karakeep saves links to web pages you might want to read or refer back to later. But it can be configured for a lot more. You can configure it to save screenshots of pages, PDFs of pages, and full text of pages. I have mine set up to do all three. That way, regardless of whether a page gets hit by link rot, I can refer to it if I wish.

Also:I test AI for a living, and these 3 free tools are the ones I use the most

You can save pages by entering the URL into a field on the product’s web interface. But a much more convenient way to save is by using the Karakeep Chrome extension. Once installed, all you need to do is tap the extension’s icon to save a page.

As you can see, it still says “Hoarded!” in the Chrome extension to indicate that your page has been saved. Oh, well.

In any case, once you click the extension’s icon, it will also go out and process the page contents for appropriate keywords. You can also add your own keywords and notes. Additionally, you can add the saved page to named lists. I usually just tap the icon and let the AI do the rest.

Once saved, you can go to your archive and scroll through snapshots of the articles you saved. Clicking the double-arrow will expand the article and show you additional features. You can read the article using one of the saved formats, add notes, edit keywords, and use AI to generate an article summary.

You can group articles by lists, search using all the usual tools, and archive articles once you’ve read them. Archiving saves all the article information, but moves the article out of the main home screen.

AI setup and cost

You can use Karakeep with a variety of AI suppliers. The setup details are described here. For the self-hosting sites, you’ll need to modify some configuration files and then provide your AI API key. These keys are available from your AI provider.

AI is available in the cloud service version of Karakeep. You’ll need to provide your API key here as well.

Also:5 ways to use AI to modernize your legacy systems

I’m using OpenAI via the API, which is an additional cost over my $20-per-month ChatGPT Plus subscription. To give you an idea of cost, I have about 25,000 items indexed in Karakeep. Moving my listings from Pocket to Karakeep took about two months because Karakeep had to rescan every article. It also called out to OpenAI so the AI could generate keywords. That process cost me about $40, paid $5 at a time.

I use Karakeep’s AI keyword service every day for five to ten articles or so. I have not been billed another $5 for seven months. I saw one estimate in the Karakeep docs that estimates you can tag 3,000 articles for about a buck. Given how long it’s been since I’ve been charged, I can pretty much concur.

Just a quick note on importing. When Pocket shut down, I was able to save the URLs for all my archived articles (but not the contents). After I set up Karakeep, I used the import function to bring them in. I had to segment the list to 500 at a time.

All told, it took me a very tedious two months to rebuild my archive, with a lot of rotted links. That said, every imported article was assigned keyword tags using the AI, which makes my archive far more valuable than it ever was in Pocket.

YouTube decluttering

If I have one bad habit (yes, OK, I have more than one), it’s that I tend to save YouTube videos as tabs in Chrome. Lots and lots and lots of YouTube videos.

I am fully convinced that YouTube is the Eighth Wonder of the World, and I’m constantly availing myself of its wonders. I mean, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen Christopher Walken dance to the dulcet tones of Fatboy Slim.

The problem with this is I had hundreds of tabs open in my browser. Tab Groups only serve to hide the other tabs that were open. I set up Today, MM, and YouTube (MM means… I honestly don’t remember, but there were 50 open YouTube tabs in there), and they all just served to hide more open tabs.

Also:I stopped using ChatGPT for everything: These AI models beat it at research, coding, and more

But then I discovered that I could use rules and lists within Karakeep to organize all those open videos. One thing I don’t like about how Chrome manages tabs is that you can’t easily see the thumbnail. When it comes to choosing which video to watch next, I’m completely thumbnail-driven.

Karakeep keeps the thumbnails. If you set the Image Options in the settings dropdown to Contain (Fit), the full original YouTube thumbnail will be shown in Karakeep. The only thing Karakeep doesn’t do for me is show viewing times. I wish it did.

Now comes some automation magic. I didn’t want my unwatched YouTube videos to mingle with my unread or saved articles. I wanted YouTube to be its own thing. So, I created a list named “YouTube.”

While I collect videos on all sorts of topics, sometimes I’m specifically in the mood for videos on the topics of AI, 3D printing, and woodworking. So I created four sublists: AI, 3D Printing, Woodworking, and Keepers. Keepers is for videos I want to keep after I’ve watched them.

Next, I set up a set of rules. Under the User Settings menu (which is different from the Settings menu for some reason), there’s a Rule Engine. I used this to create a main YouTube rule.

Also:There’s an easy way to skip YouTube’s new unskippable ads, but you may not like it

This is triggered whenever a bookmark is added (so for everything I save). That’s specified at (1). It only takes action if the URL contains youtube.com (shown at 2). When it runs, it first adds the bookmark to the YouTube list (at 3) and then archives the bookmark (at 4). This makes sure the bookmark isn’t stored in the main home list of Karakeep.

Now that I’ve added the link to YouTube, some additional processing takes place for each of my special interest areas: AI, 3D printing, and woodworking. The same rule style is used for each, except with different list names. I’ll show you how the AI one works, and you can use the same format for other special interests.

This may seem a little confusing, but it’s basically the same as setting up a Gmail filter. You make your selections based on a criterion and then specify a filing action. The only complexity is that the AI assigns tags more slowly, so you need to consider the order of operations to make it work.

Also:YouTube Premium vs. YouTube Premium Lite: Are the upgrades worth the $6 difference?

Keep in mind that the process of adding a bookmark is very fast, but assigning keywords using AI takes a few seconds. That means that every YouTube bookmark saved automatically goes into the general YouTube list because, when that rule is triggered, no keyword processing has taken place. It will be filtered again once the tags have been added.

With that in mind, here’s how the AI rule (and the other special interest rules) work.

1. It’s triggered when the “Artificial Intelligence” tag is added to the bookmark by the AI.
2. It only runs for “Artificial Intelligence” tags applied to videos from YouTube.
3. It adds the bookmark to the YouTube / AI list.
4. It archives the bookmark, removing it from the main list.
5. It also removes the bookmark from the main YouTube list, now that it’s meant for the AI sublist.

My process is to save the videos I want to watch. Then, once I watch them, I either delete them from Karakeep or move them to the Keepers folder. At some point, I may decide to create keeper categories, but for now, I’m just saving them in one folder.

Getting an AI assist

This article is an AI story, but it’s different from most that we’ve been writing. For most generative AI coverage, the AI component is the star of the show. Whether it’s writing something new, creating code, drawing amazing pictures, or even generating movies and videos, most generative AI attention has been squarely focused on the AI offering.

Also:Long YouTube video? This free AI tool finds the good parts for you – here’s how

In this article, I’m focused on archiving and organization. That said, AI substantially enhances the organization of content. It is also particularly good at enhancing the discovery process for all the archived stuff. With the ability to dynamically and automatically generate keywords, finding articles and videos on topics of interest in the moment becomes practical.

As I showed in the YouTube archiving section, we can also mix the control provided by traditional rules and filters with the power of AI, allowing us to automatically catalog videos with a single click.

Moving forward, let’s keep our eyes out for more places where AI isn’t the star of the show, but instead grants an assist, making something work better, smarter, or easier. I took a long-obsolete old computer out of the closet, added Docker and Linux, mixed in an almost free AI capability, and now have a resource that is incredibly useful to my day-to-day productivity.

What’s next? Stay tuned.

---

You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to subscribe to my weekly update newsletter, and follow me on Twitter/X at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, on Bluesky at @DavidGewirtz.com, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.