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Show HN: Pinbot – An extension to privately search one's browser history with AI

98 pointsby klavinskiabout 2 years ago
Hello HN, I’m Kamil.<p>The past months have been filled with news about ChatGPT, Bard, etc. Thankfully, there are some heroic attempts to bring that power to the users.<p>I wanted to contribute to that effort with my side project, an extension for Chrome: it makes searching the history by meaning – instead of the exact words – possible.<p>This is only a proof of concept, building on the excellent transformers.js[0], and running entirely in the browser. My goal here is to explore the possibilities unlocked by a client-side AI.<p>I would love to have your feedback, to know which direction that project should follow!<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenova.github.io&#x2F;transformers.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenova.github.io&#x2F;transformers.js</a>

15 comments

kejabout 2 years ago
Any plans for a Firefox version? There are dozens of us.
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havalocabout 2 years ago
Update. Unfortunately I noticed my Mac getting hot, and I checked the activity monitor, energy impact was several thousand (whatever units Apple uses). Typically energy impact of Chrome is 120 or so. I removed the plugin (which also crashed once) and as soon as I did, the energy use dropped back to normal.
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Freebytesabout 2 years ago
I would like something similar to VoidTools Everything that allows a person to search their own computer using AI to generate answers instead. (But it should not send any information to third parties such as OpenAI.)
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scetronabout 2 years ago
Sadly not related to the 1990 NES Game (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pin_Bot_(video_game)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pin_Bot_(video_game)</a>)
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havalocabout 2 years ago
I think you can only search pages that you visited after you installed the plugin, is that correct?
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visargaabout 2 years ago
Does it work for PDFs too? It would be amazing to find any paragraph.<p>I noticed it doesn&#x27;t remember tweets directly, just twitter.com as url if you check the feed. It&#x27;s hard to find again a tweet at that location.
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jimmySixDOFabout 2 years ago
Hey Nice idea I like the concept as someone who does sometimes go back through old history files to find that site I was on last week&#x2F;month and knows how frustrating it can be as an experience.<p>One question I have is about the persistence of this extension when Im not using it and influence on other browsing loads like if I visit a WebGPU heavy shader site will having Pinbot installed drop my available framerate for example ?<p>Otherwise its a great Idea and will definitely put it on at least one machine I use so thanks for putting this out into the world and good luck with it !
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int_19habout 2 years ago
This is a great idea, but one thing that I immediately wished for is that it&#x27;s not tied to a specific browser instance or even a browser. I&#x27;d much prefer some kind of central indexing server that maintains the embeddings along with metadata from all the various sources and allows querying, setting retention periods etc, and with extensions like this one transparently feeding data into it.
mrwnmonmabout 2 years ago
How is that private?<p>You are fetching the browsing data, push it back to your server to be fed to AI, then receive queries.. right?
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havalocabout 2 years ago
I like this a lot, but I would like it to be easier to:<p>Prevent it from indexing sites I say, such as my banking website, etc. I think that should be a top priority. And having a strong privacy policy on the site (I know you say it&#x27;s local, etc), but this is pretty great and I am already enjoying it.
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quickthrower2about 2 years ago
That is very useful. It seems to only work on sites you have visited since installing. It would be nice if it could index your current history at installation time, even though it wont have access to the contents of those pages (probably).
luke-stanleyabout 2 years ago
This seems cool but to aid trust in these sorts of things, perhaps a UserScripts version rather than a packaged Chrome extension with easy to read code would be an easier ask? Tampermonkey and Greasemonkey etc still work.
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visargaabout 2 years ago
Does it keep history only for 2 weeks?<p>&gt; The current extension keeps your history for only two weeks. Accounts keep all your history and synchronize it across your devices, while maintaining your privacy. Upcoming in a future version!
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swarfieldabout 2 years ago
Did anyone else think Pinball?
super256about 2 years ago
Would be great if you could create this for bookmarks.
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