Show HN: Extension for full-text browser history search | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Extension for full-text browser history search

rearview-ai.vercel.app

29 pointsApbNfMR11 comments

Hey. I’ve been working on Rearview, a browser extension that makes browsing history more useful. It’s available for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox.

What it does:

- Full-text Search: Search page content, not just URLs or titles.

- More Filter: Organize history by date, time, or visits.

- AI Assistant: Get insights from your history. (Optional, with your own api key.)

Everything stays local in IndexedDB.

Feedback & Feature request welcome.

BTW, since Firefox does not provide a favicon URLs implementation (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1315616),I am currently requesting icons in Firefox via https://icon.horse/, the performance seems not ideal. Is there a more recommended solution?

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Seeing the GitHub link made me assume for a second this was open source, which it's disappointingly not. The LLM search is interesting, but it's not interesting enough for me when there's already an open source full text history extension that I've been using https://github.com/iansinnott/full-text-tabs-forever

Oh, cool. I want this but not quite badly enough to work all the corner cases out. Were you able to figure out how to sync pages visited on mobile?

What’s your intended synchronization effect? Browsing on your phone and later retrieving that history on your PC? Or ensuring a fully consistent experience across both devices? The latter could be a challenge for the current local storage structure.

How and where is the full text of every page I visit getting stored & for how long?

"All browsing history, search indexes, and extension settings are stored locally on your device and are not uploaded to the developer server."

It's in the privacy policy.

I saw that. It meant where is it going to be stored locally, for how long and what is the size going to look like. I imagine that's going to be a very large cache to keep them forever essentially.

IndexedDB file

Wouldn't storing each and every visited page's text bloat IndexedDB a lot?

I don’t store full copies of all html text, only those containing readable articles. I’m researching how to align the index with the browser’s own history retention period,will be release soon.

For my personal use, it’s primarily about: Retrieving sources I’ve briefly glanced at & Summarizing recent readings on specific topics.

I’m still unsure whether to position this system for long-term archival purposes.If so, I might consider integrating storage solutions like WebDAV as an optional.

You actually don't need to store the pages themsleves, just the indexes. This is a fairly common use case with Marklogic so I'm sure it can be done with other databases.

Cool! Reminds me of Falcon[0][1].

[0]: https://github.com/lengstrom/falcon/

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12479977

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