1

For years I have been creating bookmarks in Google Chrome and now there are so many (around 2000) that I would spend days checking one by one to make sure that the URLs are still valid, and that the sites and or pages haven't gone away.

How could I automate checking these bookmarks for broken links and, ideally, remove bookmarks with invalid URLs?

I'm running Chrome on Windows 7.

Answering Rich Homolka: by "broken" I mean "kaput", not working, damaged, something that has ceased to perform the function for which was created.

Improve this question
5
  • 1
    Website bookmarks? Which browser?
    – ᔕᖺᘎᕊ
    Commented Jun 14, 2014 at 14:25
  • Hi Fernando. I rewrote your question to focus on the problem, not assuming there's a program to do it. You've indeed told us more about the problem but you still haven't even told us what browser and operating system you're using. You won't be able to get an answer without this information.
    – slhck
    Commented Jun 14, 2014 at 18:41
  • 3
    Also, what's broken mean? No website? 404? A huge subset of what you'd consider "broken" will be landing pages or redirects. A .com domain is too valuable to leave empty and a lot of links will be active but not pointing to the content you originally cared about.
    – Rich Homolka
    Commented Jun 14, 2014 at 18:56
  • @RichHomolka I'd presume he means anything with either a 404 response code, or host not found. For the most part, web sites that display custom "page not found" pages still send a 404 response in the header.
    – Jason C
    Commented Jun 15, 2014 at 6:40
  • I vote close, your answer to comment by @RichHomolka doesn't add anything useful. Broken, kaput etc. aren't measurable, detectable, you were asked for details, and failed to provide them.
    – Joep van Steen
    Commented Jun 26 at 19:23

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
-1

You can do this using the Bookmarks Checker and Bookmarks clean up Chrome extensions. They can check all your bookmarks and identify the ones that seem broken.

Bookmarks Checker

It scans your bookmarks, and you get a report for each folder that looks like this:

Bookmarks Checker Screenshot

Bookmarks clean up

It scans your bookmarks and displays the broken ones under four different categories: “403 Forbidden”, “404 Not Found”, “Unknown Error” and “Request Timed Out”:

Bookmarks clean up screenshot

Final Words

In my experience, both tools yield very similar results, so pick one, and that should do the trick.

Some of the bookmarks identified by these tools might be false positives, as some websites identify that a tool rather than a real user has tried to access them. So, after scanning, it’s better to check the flagged bookmarks yourself and delete them manually.

Also, using these tools might get you blocked from websites that use Cloudflare for security (especially if you have many bookmarks from the same site):

Cloudflare blocked screenshot

If you have bookmarked a specific webpage rather than a whole website, before deleting the bookmark, it is worth checking on the Internet Archive if the page is still accessible there.

Improve this answer
3
  • Bookmark Checker has been recommended twice before. There is a reason questions seeking recommendations are not allowed.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jun 22 at 21:46
  • @Ramhound The question has been open for 10 years. If you think it's not allowed, you can vote to close.
    – hb20007
    Commented Jun 23 at 8:54
  • I already did. Voted to close before I submitted my comment.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jun 23 at 16:19

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .