How to find a website you visited in Chrome

TabCmdr's way

Search your history from any page with TabCmdr

TabCmdr is a keyboard launcher that lives in your browser. It searches your history from the page you’re on, so you don’t have to leave what you’re reading to find a page you saw earlier.

Before you start: add TabCmdr from the Chrome Web Store. It has a 7-day free trial and needs no account.

Step 1: Open the palette

Press ⌘+K on a Mac or Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux, on any page.

Step 2: Type :h and part of the page’s title or address

Here, :h lisbon finds four pages about a trip to Lisbon. The most recent visit is at the top, and each row shows how long ago you were there, such as 1m ago, Yesterday or Mon 14 Apr.

History search looks for the letters you type, in that order, anywhere in the page’s title or address. One distinctive word works better than a whole sentence, and part of an address works too, such as :h timeout.com.

Step 3: Press Enter

The highlighted page opens in a new tab. Press ↓ or ↑ to pick a different row first. The highlighted row also has buttons to open the page in an incognito window or copy its address, which TabCmdr confirms with URL copied.

You don’t always need :h. In a normal search, up to five matching pages from your history appear under your open tabs.

Search further back

TabCmdr searches the last week of your history by default. To change that:

1. Open the palette, type settings and press Enter on TabCmdr Settings.
2. Choose Search & Results in the sidebar.
3. Under Default Search Content, set History Timeframe to Last Hour, Last 24 Hours, Last Week, Last Month, Last Year or All Time.

The same setting decides how far back history goes in normal searches. If you closed the tab only a short while ago, it may also be in your recently closed tabs, which the guide to reopening closed tabs covers.