WorldBrain - Full-text search your browsing history, bookmarks and PDFs | Hacker News Reader

WorldBrain - Full-text search your browsing history, bookmarks and PDFs

github.com

This is about the 3rd or 4th attempt at this idea since I attempted it. My effort was moderately successful:

http://lifehacker.com/deeper-history-searches-the-contents-o...

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/chrome-deeper-history/

That being said, there are serious security concerns with kind of project (which is why I stopped development) and likely why full text search was taken out of Chrome by google years ago. It is not insurmountable, by any means, but I didn't like the idea of know that if I was successful and reached a very large audience that I might also be responsible for serious identify theft and other hacks.

I'll also point out that I did collect usage stats for a time, and they were horrific. At my peak I had ~5000 installs and out of those 5k something like 3-5 searches/day was the norm.

I would be happy to share my experience with the dev team. I still have code that may be of use as well.

Hey @alistproducer2!

thanks for your comments. Yeah, we are aware that this could become an issue and will work on making it secure in the future.

Thanks for your offer to share your experience. You can write me at oli@worldbrain.io or we have the discussion here for now. Whatever you are more comfortable with!

Best, Oliver

I'm curious about the organizational aspect of your project. that's a nut I've yet to crack. what was your strategy in building a community around your project?

First, we want to make this tool really usable to the individual and gather a couple of thousand users with it.

Without the needs of an individual fulfilled, there won't form a "fact-checking" community after all.

We want to spread it by engaging in those groups on the web where fact-based discussions are happening, as well as the general science communication community. Also providing/gathering more tools and useful content that help our users to do their work more efficiently. Basically by building a content brand around collaborative web-research, fact-checking etc.

Then in further development, we make the sharing part possible, from which we think that a community will form quite organically.

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