From 20 tabs to a piece of research you can open again: when the browser becomes your desk
About research itself
When we talk about how people gather information today, the focus usually lands on how powerful note-taking software is, how fast AI search has become, or how pretty some bookmark tool looks.
But the actual situation is: most of a person's research trail ends up lost across twenty unclosed tabs.
Those tabs stay open because we haven't finished deciding yet. Once we decide, they get closed along with everything else. But the part in between — comparing, hesitating, accumulating — which is where research actually happens, is never preserved.
Pain point
I have run into this exact sequence many times:
- Planning a trip — hotel, flights, itinerary, restaurants all open at once. Every tab has something worth remembering, but once I take screenshots, I can't tell which screenshot belongs to which option.
- Comparing three laptops — every brand has its own product page with its own framing. I end up drawing a table myself before I can actually compare.
- Reading a long article and wanting to mark something — but the chain of Notion-screenshot-paste-tag breaks the reading rhythm entirely.
- Researching an industry — three days later I try to find a sentence I saw at the time, and I cannot locate the tab.
The same thing happens when I want to share the research with a friend going on the trip — sending one URL after another. We never actually compare or discuss anything, because every link opens a new window. The mobile experience is worse. And if I want to consolidate into Notion, I have to copy-paste again.
So the pain point is not "there is no tool". The pain point is: every existing tool requires a human to aggregate, to copy from one place and paste into another, before anything is usable.
But real research doesn't happen that way. Research happens while you are still uncertain — you see a sentence that feels interesting, but you don't yet know why, and you haven't yet seen how it connects to anything else. At that moment, you don't need a tool that says "come back once you've thought it through and fill in the form". You need a container that lets you scoop it up first, look at it again later.。
How it works: keep the "moment" of research
In the past, going from "I just saw a sentence worth keeping" to "it is actually written down somewhere" involved at least three or four steps — copy, switch app, paste, tag, return to browser. Every extra step is one more chance to say "I'll do it later". And later usually means never.
Aureen compresses that distance into two:
Step 1 · Capture
Select text on any page → one click to highlight → assign a tag. Or drag a region → screenshot, automatically saved with the URL and page title attached.
Step 2 · Export to PDF / Markdown / JSON
Every highlight and screenshot gets grouped under the tag you gave it, in the same chapter.
No app switching. No new tabs.
Every highlight and screenshot carries its source link. Three days from now, you or your friend or anyone can trace a sentence or a product back to where it came from — without scrolling through browser history. Aureen takes you straight back to the source.
The actual design call: tags, not folders
Most note-taking tools force you to decide which folder something belongs in at the moment you save it. But early in research, you don't yet know how this piece of information relates to what you are thinking about.
So Aureen uses tags — not folders.
Every highlight or screenshot can carry any number of tags. While researching backpacks, you might use "ultralight", "backpacks", "japan". A week later you notice "ultralight" also covers the sleeping bag and tent you were researching earlier — different research topics suddenly form a single thread under that lens.
Export and local storage
- Data is stored locally — nothing uploaded, no account needed
- Export anytime — PDF, Markdown or JSON, your pick
Once exported as Markdown, you can paste it straight into another notes app, hand it to an AI to organize, or write it into your own blog.
What it gives you
Aureen is not a notes app. It is a research tool.
When you open it three days later, you'll see that the tags you accumulated are themselves a map of how you research. What you were curious about, which options you compared, which one you finally picked — those traces surface on their own.
For people who research seriously: you're not using a tool, you're accumulating a research history that belongs only to you.
Finally
What I'm most satisfied with, from building this: the value of a tool is not in what it lets you do, but in what it lets you not have to do.
And I will keep refining it.