Three ways to search bookmarks in Chrome on a Mac

The bookmark manager: ⌥⌘B

Press ⌥⌘B — Option, Command and B — and Chrome opens the bookmark manager in a new tab. The search field sits at the top right. Type into it and the list below narrows to every bookmark whose title or address contains what you typed, from every folder at once.

• It searches the whole library, not the folder you are looking at. That is the main reason to use it over browsing the tree.
• Results show which folder each bookmark came from, which is often the fastest way to remember where things ended up.
• You can act on results in place — rename, move, delete — which the address bar cannot do.

The same window is under the three-dot menu, at Bookmarks and lists, then Bookmark manager, if you would rather not learn the shortcut.

The address bar, which is usually faster

Chrome will search bookmarks from the address bar without you asking. Start typing and matching bookmarks appear in the dropdown mixed in with history and search suggestions, each labelled with a small bookmark icon.

The problem is the mixing. A common word brings back history entries, suggested searches and bookmarks together, and the one you want is somewhere in the middle.

@bookmarks   ⇥   pavo mount

Type @bookmarks, press Tab or Space, and the address bar switches into a bookmarks-only mode — Chrome shows a small chip confirming it. Everything you type after that is matched against bookmarks and nothing else. In Edge the same trick is @favourites, and Brave and Vivaldi both understand @bookmarks.

Searching bookmarks in Brave, Edge, Arc and Vivaldi

All four are built on the same engine as Chrome, so all three methods above work in each of them, with small differences in naming.

• Brave and Vivaldi: identical to Chrome. ⌥⌘B opens the manager, and @bookmarks works in the address bar.
• Edge: the manager is ⌥⌘B as well, but the feature is called favourites throughout, and the address bar keyword is @favourites.
• Arc: ⌘F searches the current page, not your library. Arc leans on pinned tabs rather than bookmarks, and its command bar (⌘T) searches those alongside tabs and history.

What none of the three can find

Every method above searches the same two fields: the title the page had when you saved it, and its address. Not the page. Not a description. Not a subject.

That is fine when you remember roughly what a thing was called. It fails completely in the case that made you search in the first place — you remember what the page was for, and the title says something else. A printable drone mount saved as "Pavo20 v3 remix (fixed)" will not answer to "drone part", however many ways you rephrase it.

There is no browser setting for this, because there is no data for it to search. The fix has to come from something that reads the pages and keeps a note of what each one was about.