Show HN: A search engine for your browsing history

6 points by _grrr 14 years ago | 3 comments

Fed up with not being able to find pages that I knew I had visited in the past I wrote a Chrome extension that automatically indexes the url, title & content of every page you visit - allowing you to search your entire browsing history.

Why is this useful? Imagine you know that last week you read a news article by author "X" but you can't remember where, or how you got to it; by searching your recawl history for "X" you can easily find the page you were looking for.

http://www.recawl.com

qxb 14 years ago |

I think you should emphasise that the browsing history is stored remotely. That looks to be the main advantage for me, because for Chrome users at least, the inbuilt history search is already very powerful. (As an example, I visited your site, then hit Cmd-Y and searched for 'italian restaurant' and it came up straight away.)

Google Account users can already activate Web History to get a similar service. Not everyone is a Google Account holder, of course. Does your service offer any additional features to Google's offering? What about a different privacy policy? For a service that will essentially store all my browsing history I found that section in particular a little sparse.

_grrr 14 years ago | |

Agreed that Chrome's history search provides similar functionality, although it is somewhat clunky to use. For example, you can not constrain results by time period.

In addition, unlike normal Google search results the history search seems to weight every word on the page equally, in recawl there is an attempt to prioritise body content whilst ignoring repeating menus & footers, and it is built on top of Lucene's excellent scoring function.

In addition for any gives search terms it learns to prefer the search results you click on, so that over time if you constantly search your history for the same or similar search terms then historical results you have already clicked on bubble up to the top.

This makes it quite a useful tool for recalling often used pages.

It also offers keywords related to your search to further help narrow down your query.

Finally, you can block certain sites that you know are not of interest from appearing in search results, again cutting down on noise.

Finally, being able to remotely search your history can come in really handy.

_grrr 14 years ago |

Clickable links

Website: http://www.recawl.com

Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pmoicpmjnblomdapfi...