> We realized although its a valuable feature to search your browsing history, its not solving a super frequent and painful problem for users
...
> We spent so much time on building the search and with it also 30-50% more time on every new feature because of interdependencies with the amount of data produced. End2End encrypted sync, backup, search performance, search filters, all were directly or indirectly necessary to work much better than we can afford. We're just 2.5 devs.
Another developer attempted this, too. But didn't have many users:
> 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.[2]
One user does point out the reason why this may not have took off:
> about once every two months, I am looking for something that I swear I came across on the Internet at some point. However, the rest of the time, I'm able to re-find it just by doing another search, whether on search-engine-of-choice, or a search box on particular-website (e.g. socnet, stackoverflow, reddit, github, hacker news...).[3]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17745931
[1] https://github.com/c9fe/22120