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Comment by _the_special_ | Hacker News Reader

The first browser to index (locally preferably) my browsing history and help me extract/surface useful information from previous pages I have visited will win me over. So far they all seem to be offering the same kind of AI that will crawl the current page and extract information from it.

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I guess this can be done with an extension that would work on all browsers. Like parse each page, save compressed text that supports fast decompressing (maybe even images), build tf/idf + cosine distance for verbantim searches & save in db and maybe add some ai to enhance the search. The next steps would be custom ai searches like "show me pages related to x", it'll quickly decompress the pages & apply the search for each but there are different approaches, like maybe saving history on a server and apply some ai model with huge context or do an initial filtering with tf/idf and apply ai after that.

i’d want a feature to only do this for pages i mark as interesting (so, a bookmarked page i guess). i may not care to recall the match summary of as milan vs napoli.

i have rafts of bookmarked pages, but i don’t know which of the 45 postgres-related pages contains a helpful sentence or phrase about indexing that i think i remember reading a few months ago.

it could be done with a boolean flag. Like the addon would work for all pages, but you would be able to filter the results by using some checkbox "Only favorites" or something like that

I made this for myself, and some of my friends found it useful so I opened the tool up to the public.

i called it tinydesk.ai, and it's free

I'm still working on RAG (been annoyingly ill last while) but you might find this interesting to keep an eye on: https://socontextual.com/

Ollama /JUST/ recently added some (fast) embeddings models: https://ollama.com/library/nomic-embed-text

If Firefox could sprint some good APIs in they could get some incredible plugins going.

I don't know much about the WebExtensions api but it's likely the apis are already there.

I swear, Safari used to have a feature like this back in version 4. You could search for text in your history, not just titles/URLs.

How much would you be ready to pay for that?

Fully local (or private cloud sync) I would go as high as $2 a month. Cloud based solution, which is the only solution I expect, not interested just yet.

(note: not OP)

$0, unless maybe someone finds a way to not pillage the data of the service and add a lot of actual value, and doesn't squat on this ultimately simple thing that should be a small piece of a much larger thing.

open source AI and browser/OS companies are going to provide an answer soon anyway.

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