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Show HN: WorldBrain – full text, local search of your browsing history

worldbrain.io

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Re: Show HN: WorldBrain – full text, local search of your browsing history

#41

Post by petra »

eloff wrote: post #36

Nice! I hacked something together to do this 12-odd years ago. I had something to save the pages I visit to folder, and then a desktop search tool dtSearch that I bought to index them. It was invaluable when I really needed it, but too awkward to be really useful. Often it ended up being easier to find the page again with Google if I remembered something unique about it. This extension looks like it could finally mak…

What about Evernote, doesn't it already do this? And how's the search quality versus this extension?

Re: Show HN: WorldBrain – full text, local search of your browsing history

#42

Post by ChrisGranger »

ByThyGrace wrote: post #37
diggan wrote: post #4

One of the reasons I keep coming back to Firefox is that Firefox seems to already be doing this. At least it searches all parts of the URL and the title, so I'm 99% successful at getting the right URL in the awesomebar when I'm looking for something. Chrome is just horrible when it comes to this, and I can never get back to previous pages when searching via the addressbar.

After searching my history for years using the awesomebar, I am pretty confident Firefox also keeps track of the queries themselves, and the choice you make in relation to the query. Say there's two websites I visit regularly with similar names? If I usually load one after typing three characters, but load the other one after typing four characters, Firefox will present the former first in the first case, and the lat…

Firefox does indeed keep track of the queries. They're located in the places.sqlite file in your profile folder, in the table moz_inputhistory.

Re: Show HN: WorldBrain – full text, local search of your browsing history

#44

Post by CGamesPlay »

stewbrew wrote: post #43

"Search every word of every website you visited" That will most likely return a lot of hits for sites I didn't like and would like to forget about.

But a normal web search already has this trait, which is presumably how you ended up on the garbage site in the first place. If you eventually found your result, a more narrow search can help you re-find it a few months down the road.

Re: Show HN: WorldBrain – full text, local search of your browsing history

#45

Post by evmar »

diggan wrote: post #4

One of the reasons I keep coming back to Firefox is that Firefox seems to already be doing this. At least it searches all parts of the URL and the title, so I'm 99% successful at getting the right URL in the awesomebar when I'm looking for something. Chrome is just horrible when it comes to this, and I can never get back to previous pages when searching via the addressbar.

On launch this was one of our banner features in Chrome -- full text search over your browsing history. I wrote some of the code. I believe we (Google's Chrome team) implemented (and contributed back) SQLite's full text search support exactly to make this feature.

I don't know why it was removed (after my time) but I do know it had a lot of problems.

1) Most users were unaware of the feature, and it's hard to find a way for them to discover it.

2) The index costs a lot of disk space, which makes #1 worse. There's a whole bunch of tradeoffs around how much storage to use vs how much history to keep. Pages that self-reload can cause the index to bloat endlessly (a real bug we had).

3) Having an index of pages locally is not sufficient to make a useful search engine. There's a lot of ranking involved in making google search good. Similarly we tried to show "snippets" of page text that showed why we showed the results we did and that itself requires a lot of effort to be useful.

#2 and #3 are just bugs that can be fixed with more effort, but it's hard to motivate that effort in the presence of #1.

(FWIW, the sibling comment about how it was removed to favor google.com searches isn't plausible to me, that's not how the Chrome team works.)

Re: Show HN: WorldBrain – full text, local search of your browsing history

#48

Post by hnisgroupthink »

diggan wrote: post #4

One of the reasons I keep coming back to Firefox is that Firefox seems to already be doing this. At least it searches all parts of the URL and the title, so I'm 99% successful at getting the right URL in the awesomebar when I'm looking for something. Chrome is just horrible when it comes to this, and I can never get back to previous pages when searching via the addressbar.

Remember when Chrome was a progressive browser?

Now it's just about authoritarianism. We have yet to get a good web3 implementation in Chrome. Android is still not setting up payment rails similar to media rails for sharing photos.

Google is going to be a blocker for innovation since they've taken an authoritarian control stance and also reap so much money from their price controls.

Re: Show HN: WorldBrain – full text, local search of your browsing history

#50

Post by joveian »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #14
diggan wrote: post #4

One of the reasons I keep coming back to Firefox is that Firefox seems to already be doing this. At least it searches all parts of the URL and the title, so I'm 99% successful at getting the right URL in the awesomebar when I'm looking for something. Chrome is just horrible when it comes to this, and I can never get back to previous pages when searching via the addressbar.

Chrome does this deliberately because they want you to do another google search instead of looking at your history.

Sadly, even in Firefox now there seems to be no way to make the address bar never do a search :(.
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