Wouldn't it be a better alternative to use an autosave plugin for the bookmarks and use a local indexer like DocFetcher or OpenSemanticSearch through the browser? Then you can also search other resources and files.
Show HN: WorldBrain – full text, local search of your browsing history
61–70 of 72 posts
Re: Show HN: WorldBrain – full text, local search of your browsing history
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :(.
Well if you make DuckDuckGo your standard search engine you only get search term suggestion without actually executing the search if you don't choose one of the terms or hit enter with a non-url in the bar - not sure if there is anything negative about this feature
Re: Show HN: WorldBrain – full text, local search of your browsing history
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where's "show full history"? I don't see anything resembling that, nor any obscure dropdowns or popouts that might be hiding it.
The "show full history" menu option in History menu they mentioned is Mac only. On Windows, you can see the "show full history" option by holding the Go Back button at top left (hover your mouse on it you'll see a tooltip suggesting this). The sad part is, that option just opens the built-in History page, just like pressing Ctrl + H, which I believe that's not what we wanted at all. I think Chrome just redefined "ful…
Ah, right, Linux has "show full history" in the Back button menu (which can also be opened by right-clicking).
And yeah, ^H isn't fun(/useful).
Re: Show HN: WorldBrain – full text, local search of your browsing history
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'd be happy if it did it just for bookmarked pages. I have often wanted that in bookmark search and it could be incorporated directly into the bookmark searchbar.
Me too! In fact, when I think about it, bookmarks are such a nebulous thing. It's like I want them to do two diametrically opposed jobs.
On the one hand, when I have a bookmark for a site like HN, I want it to give me a quick way to get to the front page and see the latest posts so I can read and discuss them. In this case, the bookmark is serving like a pointer to an address whose contents are subject to change.
On the other hand, I bookmark pages with specific information I want to keep so I can refer back to it later. This is where bookmarks often fail me. Websites are transient by nature and bookmarks are extremely vulnerable to link rot. What I think I'd really want is a bookmark that saves an archive of the page so that I'll always have access to the information in its original form, even if the page changes or the site goes down. In this case, the bookmark is functioning more like a constant than a variable.
I'm aware that browsers such as Safari have the ability to save a page as a web archive file which includes all the data needed to render the page in its original form. The problem is that this feature completely punts on the issue of managing a set of these web archives, delegating that task to the Finder. I want a UI that is more integrated into the browser. If I bookmark a site it should save and manage the archive automatically. Full text search on all my bookmark archived pages should be built into the address bar. Perhaps in order to avoid the conflict between the two uses of bookmarks described above there could be a difference between favourites and bookmarks.
I don't know, does anyone else have any thoughts about this stuff?
Re: Show HN: WorldBrain – full text, local search of your browsing history
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly, even in Firefox now there seems to be no way to make the address bar never do a search :(.
Well if you make DuckDuckGo your standard search engine you only get search term suggestion without actually executing the search if you don't choose one of the terms or hit enter with a non-url in the bar - not sure if there is anything negative about this feature
I already have it set to not show any search suggestions since if I wanted that I would use the search box. I want it to not send the data anywhere if I hit enter (by accident, because I pasted what I thought was going to be a domain name but turned out to be something else) and it isn't a possible domain name or ip address. Not super high impact (accidently pasting a password I assume would generate a DNS lookup anyway) but it fells like a completely gratutious invasion of privacy when I have already indicated in multiple ways that I do not want to search from the address bar.
Re: Show HN: WorldBrain – full text, local search of your browsing history
#66One 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.
No matter what firefox does well, it isn't going to keep converts as long as their default background is so blindingly white.
I still don't understand why firefox refuses to slightly gray out their background by default. Chrome puts less strain on my eyes and that's far more important than anything firefox does well.
Every time I try to stick with firefox, my eyes get strained and eventually I go back to chrome.
Re: Show HN: WorldBrain – full text, local search of your browsing history
#67This seems a very interesting project. I'll see how this works in practice. It starts to get icky when you notice the devs have a business plan to outsource the indexing to the cloud, but there's a commitment to keep the servers parts open source too, so that you can self host.
Oli here from the team building Memex. Yeah indeed, having stuff in the cloud is not ideal when it comes to privacy and centralisation. One of our core values is privacy and data ownership. So we do our best to make our business not dependent on (analysing and selling) your data, and instead provide you with service value you're willing to pay for. We are built with interoperability in mind, that will allow you to sw…
Thanks for the long response.
I was wondering about mobile usage too, and agree that having a server somewhere available for queries is the best solution. Since this deals with such private data, having a possibility for self-hosting is the correct solution.
Re: Show HN: WorldBrain – full text, local search of your browsing history
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be happy if it did it just for bookmarked pages. I have often wanted that in bookmark search and it could be incorporated directly into the bookmark searchbar.
Me too! In fact, when I think about it, bookmarks are such a nebulous thing. It's like I want them to do two diametrically opposed jobs. On the one hand, when I have a bookmark for a site like HN, I want it to give me a quick way to get to the front page and see the latest posts so I can read and discuss them. In this case, the bookmark is serving like a pointer to an address whose contents are subject to change. On…
Oli here from the team developing Memex.
thanks for speaking my mind here :)
We built Memex for that combination of use cases in mind. So right now you can already full-text search your bookmarks, and filter by time, domain and tags. Already on the mid-term roadmap we plan to enable full-html/text snapshots of visited pages, both locally and on-demand. For the latter we are potentially working with the Internet Archive.
Re: Show HN: WorldBrain – full text, local search of your browsing history
#69One 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…
Agree with #3, I built a similar tool with Rails/Elastic search/React couple of years back. It never returned the most relevant results on top. Realized Elastic search can only do that if I could add back-links for ranking and for adding back-links (I could be wrong) I would have to crawl the entire internet.
Re: Show HN: WorldBrain – full text, local search of your browsing history
#70It would be great to be able to change the search engine keyword from 'w' to something else. My brain has hardwired that to the Wikipedia search.
Otherwise, I think this is super!