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Comment by granzymes | Hacker News Reader

Being able to search browser history with natural language is the feature I am most excited for. I can't count the number of times I've spent >10 minutes looking for a link from 5 months ago that I can describe the content of but can't remember the title.

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In my experience, as long as the site is public, just describing what I want to ChatGPT 5 (thinking) usually does the trick, without having to give it access to my own browsing history.

I think that such feature is already available in Chrome https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/15305774?hl=en

Ah, makes sense why I need to use an extension for that:

> To use this feature, you must be located in the US

I just don't get this. Google has SO MANY THINGS that are US only. While most other companies release things to everyone (like OpenAI).

How does Google expect to compete with OpenAI globally if they keep limitting the rest of the world?

What's not to get? Talk to your political representatives about reining in the EDPB if you want access to cutting edge features.

Or if you are not in the EU, spend more money I guess and become an attractive market.

You think normies even know what Gemini is LMAO. No one except some hackernews users and weirdos know it.

"Ask your politicians to allow foreign companies free reign with users' data" is certainly a wild take.

It's google's choice to forgo privacy and thus a huge market like the EU. Other companies, like OpenAI, seem to manage fine.

At some point, Europe will learn that if they keep preventing international solutions without creating a climate in which similar or better local solutions can emerge, they are cutting their own nose to spite the face. There are secondary and tertiary effects of this, and eventually the 'huge market' will shrink in importance. I mean, Brazil is a huge market, and no-one cares about them thanks to brain-dead legislation concerning tech imports and economic irrelevance.

No one cares about it because you get robbed on gunpoint at the stoplights.

Again no one in Europe cares about some Gemini because frankly no one even knows what it is. They had their run with the black founding fathers and most people who tried it then dismissed it forever.

For normal people ChatGPT = AI.

I don't think this is true though. Lots of people around me use "ChatGPT" but then are actually using Gemini because that's what is on their phone.

Google is an established business, OpenAI is desperately burning money trying to come up with a business plan. Exports controls and compliance probably isn't going to be today's problem for them, ever.

Maybe those features are illegal in every other country.

Its not by choice

They don't, the Gemini crap is dead in the water and only people who care about it are hackernews people or some weirdos. For normies ChatGPT equals AI and that's that, they already won by the brand alone.

When normies hear Gemini, they cringe and get that icky feeling.

It didn't help that when Gemini came out it was giving you black founding fathers and Asian nazis.

My dad uses Gemini because it's the default thingy on his android phone - I asked him if he used ChatGPT and he said yes and navigated to Gemini. Most people really don't care that much I think.

Isn’t this what Recall in Windows 11 is trying to solve, and everyone got super up in arms over it?

I have no horse in the race either way, but I do find it funny how HN will swoon over a feature from one company and criticize to no end that same feature from another company just because of who made it.

At least Recall is on-device only, both the database and the processing.

I think it makes sense, many don't have a choice to run Windows (Linux/Mac won't work for them for whatever reason). If MS turned on Recall without a disable (and its not hard to believe they wouldn't, onedrive), people would be upset.

With ChatGPT Atlas, you simply uninstall it. done.

> I do find it funny how HN will swoon over a feature from one company and criticize to no end that same feature from another company

It's pretty easy to explain if you assume that HN consists of multiple people with varying opinions.

I'm the last person to defend OpenAI on literally anything and personally I hope they crash and burn in a spectacular fashion and take the whole market down with them, but you at least have a choice in using Atlas as it's simply a program that you install on your computer of your own volition. With Recall, there's no choice, M$ will just shove it down your throat whether you want it or not, and most likely (knowing their history it's pretty much a guarantee) you'll be stuck with the privacy nightmare that is Recall with nothing you can do about it.

So the pushback makes perfect sense to me. Also, HN isn't 1 entity, it's many people with many different opinions, you can easily find people who were/are excited about Recall the same way people are excited about Atlas.

Are we talking searching the URLs and titles? Or the full body of the page? The latter would require tracking a fuckton of data, including a whole lot of potentially sensitive data.

All of these LLMs already have the ability to go fetch content themselves, I'd imagine they'd just skim your URLs then do it's own token-efficient fetching. When I use research mode with Claude it crawls over 600 web pages sometimes so imagine they've figured out a way to skim down a lot of the actual content on pages for token context.

I made my own browser extension for that, uses readability and custom extractors to save content, but also summarizes the content before saving. Has a blacklist of sites not to record. Then I made it accessible via MCP as a tool, or I can use it to summarize activity in the last 2 weeks and have it at hand with LLMs.

A tangential issue is that pages often change over time. So your snapshot could be stale. Not sure whether that’s a bug or a feature.

Opera had the latter before switching to Chromium... I miss it.

I find browser history used to be pretty easy to search through and then Google got cute by making it into your "browsing journeys" or something and suddenly I couldn't find anything

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