Marian
Save the sentence, not the page. A Chrome extension for highlighting and annotating the web, with a FastAPI backend and an AI layer you can ask about everything you've ever saved.
Try it: askmarian.com · Install from the Chrome Web Store
What it is
Marian is a Chrome extension for highlighting, noting, and finding things again. You highlight any passage on any page, add notes, organize into collections, and search everything you've ever marked. Highlights are persistent — they survive page redesigns and edits rather than breaking the moment a site ships a new layout.
The problem
Bookmarks save the wrong thing. A URL tells you nothing about why you saved it — the sentence that made you stop and think is the part worth keeping, and that's exactly the part a bookmark throws away. Marian saves the passage, not the address.
What it does
- Highlighting in five colors, with notes and tags
- Persistent highlights that survive page edits and redesigns
- A searchable library organized by page
- Sticky notes you can place anywhere on a page
- Export to Markdown, JSON, or CSV
- Citation generation in MLA, APA, and Chicago formats
- Works offline, with optional cross-device sync
Asking your own library
The part I find most interesting is what happens once you've saved enough. You can ask a question about a single passage and get an answer grounded in the page it came from — or ask your whole library “what do I know about this?” and get an answer that cites the specific passages it drew from, and says so when it doesn't know. The AI features are opt-in; everything works without them.
On privacy
No analytics, no tracking, no ads. It deliberately doesn't run on banking or healthcare pages, and works offline by default — an account is only needed for sync.
The stack, and why
A Chrome extension on the front end, backed by a FastAPI service that handles storage and the AI layer. Keeping retrieval and generation server-side is what makes library-wide questions possible at all — the extension alone can only see the page you're on. [TODO: manifest version, how highlight anchoring survives DOM changes, and which models the AI layer uses.]
Status & what's next
Live on the Chrome Web Store at v0.1.0. [TODO: what prompted building it, early usage, and what's next on the roadmap.]