SeenBefore: A search engine for what you have seen before

Obvious point to raise: the reason people regularly delete their browser history is because they watch porn without turning on private browsing. How do you propose to deal with this?<p>You'd need to provide at least the ability to selectively delete portions of the history. But you can selectively delete portions of your browser history too, and people don't - because it would be too easy to miss something. Instead, they just nuke the whole thing. How is your tool different?

Beat me to it! This was something I had been planning to build on my own for a while, but didn't get around to . Congrats!<p>Whenever I have tech discussions with friends I would recall something mentioned in a article I read via HN. But it would take me a whole lot of effort to get that link. Oftentimes I simply couldn't get hold of the link even after an hour of searching.<p>Please do get the Firefox extension out. Would love to use it. Also, please do make sure the extensions/addons are stable. Have been facing problems with Annotary's extensions [1], for instance.<p>By the way, do you have a crawler fetch the link content or do you send it from the user's browser?<p>[1] <a href="https://getsatisfaction.com/annotary/topics/unstable_browser_extensions" rel="nofollow">https://getsatisfaction.com/annotary/topics/unstable_browser...</a>

Interesting idea. Some quick questions:<p>- How much data do you store per user?<p>- How do I delete certain results? (preferably after the search comes back)<p>- Another thing to consider is - After how much time does this just become as painful as finding that page through a search engine?<p>- What version of the page gets stored? The <i>latest</i> or the one that I saw?<p>I guess its one step better than Evernoting a page and adding tags myself.<p>Good luck!

Some of the things I "see", I would prefer they never show up in a Google search.<p>I'm sure there is a configuration setting somewhere to deal with that, but it would be yet another thing to take care of.

One feature that could help this: verifying that the account holder is the one using the computer, before showing results.<p>Without this, assuming this plugin is always-on on all the computers one uses, breaking user's privacy just becomes too easy.<p>And there's a lot of data one might want to leave private except porn(and usually don't post them in facebook): medical issues, sexual issues, marriage and some other relationship issues, drugs issues and probably others.

You could hook it into Chrome's history API[1].<p>[1] <a href="http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/history.html" rel="nofollow">http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/history.html</a>

Hmm, this is similar to <a href="http://historio.us" rel="nofollow">http://historio.us</a>, which I built. However, this doesn't require any user interaction, which might work well.<p>Do you store just the URL and depend on Google returning the results? How does it work exactly?

"SeenBefore stores your information securely in the cloud from your work or home computers.<p>So no matter where you read it you can still search for it even when your browsing history has been deleted."<p>Erm...<p>I think it's a good idea but I think many people would need convincing on the security front.

Who am I handing my data over to? I can't find this anywhere on the site.

Yes, I have seen it before! I have build a personal search engine MindRetrieve back in 2005.<p><a href="http://mindretrieve.net" rel="nofollow">http://mindretrieve.net</a><p>Specifically I'm not comfortable for big web company to keep the history of my web activity. So I make it work completely locally. My project did not get much uptake, probably my lackluster marketing and other assorted issues are to blame. So good luck on this one!

Co-founder here. This took us by surprise, we were planning to have Firefox and Safari support done by launch. At this stage, it is priceless to know if we are solving a real problem people have. Also, is this something people would pay for (loops back to if this is enough of a pain point). From the moment we start charging, is the moment we start learning.

"40% of searches online are people simply looking for what they have already seen before." - How did they calculate this statistic?

I get that deployment is easier when it is vendor hosted, but this really should be a local app using local storage, withe maybe transient server-side storage for syncing between machiens.

Dup of Archify?<p><a href="https://www.archify.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.archify.com/</a><p>&#62; 40% of searches online are people simply looking for what they have already seen before.<p>Citation link needed.

I think this is a great idea. I've been using Opera, which has a full-text search capability for history, but it's limited to the machine you're using it on.<p>I often find interesting articles on Hacker News while I'm at home that I want to find again when I'm at work. Being able to search by browser history across machines is fantastic for me.

YES! I've been looking for something like this for ages for stuff I have read on Hacker News.

I'll take it for a spin... this is something I've wanted for a long time.<p>I was going to hack it by making chrome bookmark every site I visit with a tag:history then when I wanted to search for a site that I've already visited I was going to just search with that tag.

Doesn't Google already have this? Go to...<p>Show Search Tools -&#62; All Results -&#62; Visited Pages

Similar to my project Peerbelt.com. A notable difference is Peerbelt runs entirely on the client to void privacy concerns. Vinny, let's chat and see if we can collaborate. Cheers, -Krassimir the Peerbelt founder

There's also weekly reports that tell you what sites you've been visiting the most, what time of day/what days you visit sites most, and how many pages SeenBefore added to your file.

In a similar vein, Pinboard offers to snapshot and full text index all your bookmarks, for a small annual fee:<p><a href="https://pinboard.in/upgrade/" rel="nofollow">https://pinboard.in/upgrade/</a>

I'm going to give it a spin and let know what I think (it'll take a few weeks of usage), but I can tell you right now that it's definitely solving a real problem I have.

I am going to try this out because it seems like what I spend a large portion of my time doing. The security and privacy of this scares me a lot though.

I love this idea but I think you will find more traction by turning it into a kind of bookmarking app with less focus on the search engine part.

I love the date visualization. This is something I think that pretty much all search results could benefit tremendously from.

How is this different from Google Search History?<p><a href="https://history.google.com" rel="nofollow">https://history.google.com</a>

Great idea, I assume with Chrome's new incognito browsing, this won't be picked up on seenbefore or am I wrong?

Looks useful. I've been well aware that google tracks everything I search for but I still don't like it.

I don't know why I should give you my browser history. I'd like to keep it to myself.

For those using Firefox, there is a similar add-on called RecallMonkey.<p><a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/prospector-recall-monkey/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/prospector-re...</a>

Great idea. Love it.

great idea and works brilliant!