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Comment by Reelin | Hacker News Reader

You've managed to put into words something that really bothers me about how software and devices are designed and used at present. An extension of my physical being (which is increasingly how devices are used) should probably be as independent as possible, not a third party service.

> I want to be able to review my digital actions - what was the name of the video I stupidly watched at 1am last night - let me review that each week so I can improve my behaviour - not have my behaviour controlled

It's almost 2020. Forget the flying car, why does my web browser still not provide full text history search if I want it? It's text, and this isn't the 1980s! Why can't it snapshot the textual portion of the DOM for each page I visit if that's what I want? Half terabyte SSDs with 700 MB/s sustained write are $80!

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That came, worked very nicely, then went with the first version or two of Google desktop search. Would search web history, local documents - word and excel included, and present it in an interface much like Google search at the time. Far as I remember all data was kept locally - it wasn't the Googleplex hoovering up yet another terabyte of your data trail or I wouldn't have touched it.

Then it started to deprecate the useful part, gain a GUI, and morph into a second-rate widget engine. By the last couple of versions I came across it was a mostly useless, very second rate copy of Konfabulator (later Yahoo Widgets). It no longer had any local document and web indexing.

I had no idea. How is something so amazingly functional and immediately useful allowed to disappear? It just seems like such an obvious thing to build into a browser engine.

No idea - a quick skim, and the first version was the one I liked most. It would search Thunderbird emails too with a plugin, was instantaneous, and for a little while was a huge productivity boon.

With a bit of thought, the later versions did retain some local search, but made it clunky and awkward. I forget quite how, only that I liked it less and less. Course before too long it was discontinued entirely. Odd really as it, to me, is the obvious use of my computer for my web activity...

Here's the original press release and a couple of screen shots: http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/10/google-announces-des...

> It would search Thunderbird emails too with a plugin, was instantaneous, and for a little while was a huge productivity boon

For the local filesystems full-text almost instantaneous search, definitely check Recoll: http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/index.html

Recoll will index an MS-Word document stored as an attachment to an e-mail message inside a Thunderbird folder archived in a Zip file (and more...). It will also help you search for it with a friendly and powerful interface, and let you open a copy of a PDF at the right page with two clicks. There is little that will remain hidden on your disk.

Baloo and Milou on the KDE desktop is often decried for performance reasons, but is quite powerful.

I like how it can perform full-text search in my documents (pdf, etc). It also searches your e-mails if you use Kmail (and contacts, events, etc if you use other KDE PIM tools).

I only wish it was a bit less eager to extract files on underpowered laptops, and it would be nice if it could OCR pdfs and tag images (facial recognition, etc).

For the PDF/OCR task I just discovered Paperwork, I think it's a Gnome project.

https://openpaper.work/

Seems apropos.

At a guess, it wasn't amenable to ad-monetisation and people weren't willing to pay for it.

And the average person has already moved far more of their life to "the cloud" to free themselves of the burden of local system administration.

Miss it an awful lot.

Another seriously nifty thing it would do if you allowed it to was to collect rss feeds from sites you visited and magically sift out stuff it knew I would be interested in.

Check Memex!

Full-Text Search your Web History & Bookmarks

https://worldbrain.io/

Not affiliated.

Someone finally did it, it's completely local, and it's MIT licensed! Based on GitHub history, development only started about 3 years ago.

And: It doesn't make your browser crawl, which still surprises me.

I have to admit that I don't use it much (I've got it mostly hidden, there are several tweaks related to visibility), but it is amazing, as you put it, that someone finally did it, and got it mostly right!

Kudos.

thank you!

Thank you very much for this!

MIT-licensed, which means that if they have any decent ideas in there Apple and/or Google can just take them all and slap them into the latest Safari or Chrome. AGPL would really be in the best interest of their codebase.

Maybe the authors don't mind if their ideas get incorporated in other projects? Maybe they are more interested in spreading their ideas than owning them?

Exactly why I used the MIT license, even if it is on my ultimately non important stuff. I'd rather it was out there (potentially) being used by anyone that wants to for whatever purpose.

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of the GPL is that the purpose isn't to retain ownership, it's to use ownership (granted under copyright laws) to ensure that the ideas can continue to spread.

The GPL doesn't prevent forks, it doesn't even prevent someone else profiting off the fork, it just requires that the fork can also be shared freely.

That sounds like a success? Not everyone is interested in getting their ego stroked.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18511760

Most of that seems oriented at full, manual archival rather than automated (lightweight-ish) text caching for search operations. ArchiveBox (https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox) looks promising, although it isn't capturing the "live" browser feed. Readable-Web Proxy (https://github.com/fake-name/ReadableWebProxy) also looks interesting, but seems to be external as well.

Maybe I just need to suck it up and roll my own.

I was going to permanently save my browsering history by running all my browsers through squid. If squid's StorageManager supports it, I'd put page storage in Postgres, then use PG's FTS with a light UI around it.

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