Hacker News Reader

I've found the cases you describe to be one of these areas where Firefox seems to behave way superior than Chrome. It's not entirely as advanced as you describe of course, but usually just typing parts of a few key words returns a list of relevant sites you've ever been to, and the ranking is very good. The algorithm seems to even take into account whether you originally typed in the link etc.

In general, if you've visited a site once, it's way easier to find it back with Firefox, and it doesn't require a Google search.

If you think about it, it is very logical that Google doesn't want to move into this direction.

This is the one reason I stick with Firefox. In Chrome if you search for the name of a YouTube video, with a string you know was in the title of the page, you're very unlikely to get that page as a result. If you're lucky you'll get another page with a link to the page you want in the suggestions list. In Firefox it'll almost always be an instant result, right at the top of the list. It seems strange, but Firefox's search really blows Chrome's out of the water.

Firefox has a name for it, it's called the AwesomeBar!

I just tried this experiment and I get the same results. Firefox uses Google search on the backend, so I don't see how it could be otherwise.

He means using the auto-complete in your address bar, not actually searching with it.

Auto-completing against what, against Google ala Google Suggest, or you mean auto-completing against your Web History?

Your web history, which is what the address bar searches in Firefox.

In Chrome these two aspects (history and Google search) are blurred, but it's not better for it. I'd say it is a good example of 2 half-assed features not making up for 1 good one.

If you want to search your Web History explicitly, just hit Ctrl-H. This is a case of personal preference. I rarely search my Web History, so I want my Omnibox real estate to be web search. Some people will prefer history ranked above search, others will prefer it the other way. Chrome should give you a preference setting for it.

With Vimperator and the command-line input, it's downright uncanny. For me to open, say, Hacker News, I'll type ":o[tab] hacker new[tab]" and a list of completions will appear. Including the main page, my comments thread, etc.

Completions are based on history and bookmarks and includes not just URLs but page titles, bookmark text, and tags, possibly more (I'm still figuring this out).

Plus you lose all the menubars and crap that steal vertical real estate.

vimperator + tree style tab + ghostery + noscript + adblock plus + all-in-one sidebar + autopager + remove it permanently makes for a pretty slick browsing experience.

Chrome is better IMO as an applications interface. Especially, of course, Google's apps: gmail, maps, G+.

I'm leaning strongly toward a bifurcation of browsers. One mode is information aquisition / research, the other is as an AJAX web-app engine. The two needs differ, and my extensively tweeked Firefox config doesn't play particularly well with applications (GMail's keyboard shortcuts, f'rex). But it makes actually, you know, surfing the web, much better.

>I envision a 'browser' that can track my behaviour, watch what I do, show me more detailed history info, make 'history' part of my 'search' results, adapt my search to my behaviour and more. Perhaps Google will be the ones to do this, but they'll only do it if they can show us more ads (or "more relevant" ads).

Doesn't google do this "in the cloud" (ugh) already?

They use your past history to tailor results to you (as DuckDuckGo calls it, "in your bubble"). It's done on their servers because they want the information, and quite frankly, have better resources to compute it on (not to mention they benefit from comparing you to others like you and so on and so forth).

They're not recording any of your activity on those pages (typing, mouse movements, copying, etc) and storing that as well. Mixing in all that usage meta-data is what I'm talking about.

I actually have an idea for an alternative that I'm building for my website (artjutsu.com). I've been using it for about 3 months now and I still have a ways to go to make it more useful. I believe it may be something that you're interested in.

I don't want to spill the beans though, so if you want to know more (or help me test/build it) please email me.

Yes, search is basically a grab bag, and browser history is decent but get's convoluted the more you use it. There are ways to make this easier, but why reinvent the wheel when you already own the wheel, right? Changing search will change major search engines business model, and share holders hate radical changes. Especially when you're raking in major dough.

Apart from privacy policy bullshit, if google can save my searches and behavior securely and show me when I need it, it will definitely save me couple of hours a week.

> Google's made inroads by making a faster browser that makes it easier to 'search' (through them, of course)

Just thought I'd point out that Chrome supports different search engines and even politely asks you which one you'd like to use at first launch.

It's sad to me only one person here seems to "get" his point. When I search for something, I still tend to have to open four or five pages to get the answer I'm looking for.

"javascript remove part of an array"

Why when I "search" for that, do I have to parse, in my brain, titles, descriptions (and so on) just to get my answer? I've searched for this a few times before,I know, because I'm terrible at remembering particular functions across languages.

Why can't my browser know when I've found the answer before? Hell, why can't my browser even offer me an option to remember that answer. I'll be happy to highlight it for it, but it's clunky and clumsy with a dumb bookmark. No nuance. Nothing was solved. And god forbid I bookmark every answer I look for; try searching through that.

It looks like Google are working on it. Here's what I see when I search for [regular expression], as I often do to double-check syntax: http://screencast.com/t/A9DoZXes6

Edit: It used to be the case that if you bookmarked the result (and had your bookmarks synced with Google), it'd star the result as well. Seems this feature has gone, though.

I see your point, but I don't think it's a real problem. Bookmark a Javascript reference and then you can go there directly, no searching necessary.

If it's specifically previously answered queries you're interested in, maybe something like OneNote would be a better solution? Then you could search your notes and probably find the old answer with a lot less noise.

I found stumble-upon to be pretty good in this regard (mainly due to the user curated bookmarks) though the quality has gone down a bit recently (thanks to the spammers)