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Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

I signed up, but didn't install the Chrome extension. I think you need to be a lot clearer about what exactly is going on.

For example, if I install the Chrome extension, and then visit my banking site, are you indexing my bank statements?

Do you only index pages we click Historify on? The answer to that question ought to be in the privacy policy. You're asking us to install an extension and give you access to EVERYTHING we do in the browser, but not explicitly stating the limits on it.

That said, if you're indexing EVERYTHING I browse to, I think this is actually a really killer app. An app with some insane privacy challenges, but a killer one nonetheless. If you're only indexing the stuff I bookmark, that's pretty cool, and a good step forward, but less exciting to me.

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Hello, and thanks for your feedback!

We're sorry to be less exciting, but we do indeed only index the historified sites, otherwise the noise would be too much for historious to be of any usefulness. Luckily the cost of bookmarking a page is really low (just one click), so you can do it as often as you like!

The extension is open source, you can download and run it yourself if you don't trust the packaged one:

http://bitbucket.org/Stavros/historious.crx

Thanks!

I actually tried indexing every page I browsed to - and you're right, it was too much. http://hystry.com

The indexing happened on the server, and the extension only sent URLs, not params or cookies. So pages needing login wouldn't be compromised.

I didn't think about the "indexing everything" from what they said. But now that you mention it, it does sound like a great app.

You could have an extension that indexes everything the user goes to. The trick would be making it usable; I almost never use the "history" in my browser, because it tends to never find what I'm looking for. But if you try and solve it in a centralized way, you could do several interesting things:

* Make searches across all the sites you visited work better, maybe by creating better indexes of the content.

* Make the search work according to sites you visited the most (e.g. I'd prefer the search to find comments on HN before other things, then articles linked to from HN, etc.).

Such a service might be pretty useful: browser history that doesn't suck, and is persistent and accessible online. Anyone want to build it?

"The trick would be making it usable; I almost never use the "history" in my browser, because it tends to never find what I'm looking for."

FYI: History in Safari rocks. Just open the history view and you have fast searching (including in page text - just checked) that shows all the resulting pages in a coverflow view.

It does, but the noise is too large, and the pages will eventually be deleted, so it's not very suitable for long term storage.

Thanks for the tip, I'll have to check that out. I use Chrome and Firefox, so I wouldn't know.

Still, something computer and browser independent might make for an interesting application.

I created a Firefox Addon and website for it last year that did everything you just wrote about, but I've since closed the project down. Let me know if you or anyone is interested in resurrecting it.

I'd like to hear more. Is it open source?

It's not open source. The Firefox Addon captured a visual snapshot and the entire page contents of every non-https page you visited, and stored it to an online database. The website allowed you to search your history, and results were based on number of visits to a page, length of time spent on page, number of times that page was selected as a search result, whether the page was actually bookmarked, etc. It was a very useful tool, but unfortunately the database grew large very fast. I tried to implement a subscription feature to offset server costs, but I had zero subscribers.

The code is all C#/MSSQL/JavaScript/XUL. If anyone's still interested gmail me at my username, and sorry for the off-topic posts!

I've been using the scrapbook firefox extension with an extension atop it called autosave. http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/addons.php

The drawback: it saves your history to local disk, and the search can get arbitrarily slow over time. I archive my history every fortnight. For older history I use grep.

It isn't something for normals, but I basically have every page I've ever browsed to since Aug '06.

>That said, if you're indexing EVERYTHING I browse to, I think this is actually a really killer app.

Google chrome has full text search over your history. And yes, I love it.

You can do full-text search of your history in chrome.

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