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Show HN: Fetch – A Chrome plugin to manage your history
- zuxfer 11y agookay, why should I let a third party access my browsing history? Big player already do that.Why should I trust a small party too? Not being cynical, just wanted to see if the payoff is worth the compromise.
- maha1979 11y agoHey Zuxfer, I'm the developer of the extension. Totally valid point, we thought a lot about privacy, and our approach to managing the issue is two fold 1. Your browsing history isn't identifiable on our databases since we use a random hash from your credentials to track your history. 2. We have absolutely no interest in using the data, even non-identifiable data for marketing purposes 3. We leave the final control in your hands, if you feel your privacy is breached, you can clear all your data from our servers and uninstall the extension. Here's our privacy policy for reference - https://getfetch.net/privacy.html https://getfetch.net/privacy.html
- maha1979 11y agoAlso, to answer why an extension for Browser History: 1. Fetch indexes page content as well as the titles and URLs of your history, making it easy to find links 2. Fetch ranks search results by engagement which means the most useful links usually surface on top when you search.
- Bedon292 11y agoNot to be overly critical, but it sounds like you are asking us to just trust you with no proof of your claims. How do we know that you in fact have properly randomized the hashes, really aren't using the data, and most importantly, how do we know you really are clearing the data from your servers when we ask you to? Are you going to make the source code available? If its running on your servers, you have to plan to monetize right? How do you plan on doing that? Edit: I should note it looks quite cool, and I am probably going to try it, but was wondering about the above points. One additional question. Is it possible to ban specific sites from showing up? Like work related intranet things?
- maha1979 11y agoYou can block sites from the settings button in the extension Our plan is to work with an initial customer base to create enough features to let users support us directly through paid features, instead of resorting to mining data and throwing up ads to sustain. Thats your best clue as to why we're not interested in your data. We don't have a motive to do that.
- HerpDerpLerp 11y agoYes... indeed... "work related" things... yes that is the problem... no other things... no.
- udayaprakash19 11y agoImagine hypothetically today you are researching a router. You would look up youtube video reviews, look it up in amazon may be craigslist, checkout consumer reports etc. The next day if want those links you will either comb your browser history or go those sites you visited again. But with fetch all you have to do is type the name of the router and it will show the links in descending order of time you have spent on various websites associated with the router :) Imagine the time saved :D
- Already__Taken 11y agoDoes fetch aggregate the logged time you've looked at the pages that you're now looking at to find the same page you found before and ruining all the results?
- maha1979 11y agoThe search results are ranked by engagement, so yes, if you're currently looking at a page related to say python and spend lots of time on it, then when you search python on the extension, it will show up near the top. But what we've noticed is that the ratio of useful pages to useless pages in browser history is very high, and so when we rank by engagement, all valuable pages end up on top. Hope this answers your query.
- ad93611 11y agoBeing able see my history sorted by amount of time I spend on a page sounds like a good idea.
- maha1979 11y agoWorked very well for our test user base of 30 users, hopefully it'll be useful to others as well
- _lce0 11y agoOT but .. I love the rubik loading[0] intro!! [0]: https://getfetch.net/img/status.gif https://getfetch.net/img/status.gif
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- cpplinuxdude 11y agoOr how to have 1984 running in your web browser. :) But some people don't care about their privacy any longer, because, well we probably have none at this point anyway. So in for a penny, in for a pound. Edit: Consider putting something about privacy right at the top of the page, if such a feature exists. e.g all bookmarks are encrypted, and only the user has the key, or whatever.
- maha1979 11y agoWill do, thanks!
- jeffehobbs 11y agoStop trying to make "fetch" happen.
- hamitron 11y agorekt
- Grue3 11y agoWhy does this even need to be in the cloud? Firefox can already do most of this offline.
- udayaprakash19 11y agoWe see the amount of links amassed by a person over time is his knowledgebase of sorts and we want it make it available to the user where ever he wants. We will be launching a mobile app soon, where in you can sign in and find any link from your history.
- lucaspottersky 11y agothanks, but i'm already happy with my data & soul being sold by Google & Facebook. /sarcasm
- cooperadymas 11y agoPrivacy concerns aside, it seems like a really useful service. How do you handle page versioning? Do you take a new snapshot every time I visit - and do you keep the most recent version or can I look at/search through previous versions? Ranking pages by how much time you spend on them seems great from a productivity standpoint. From a search standpoint, often the pages I want to go back and find ex post facto are the ones that I only looked at for a few seconds. So maybe it's still helpful? Yet to be seen! A little feedback on the page copy. Any time someone claims they have "proprietary algorithms" it sets off alarms. It's empty jargon, and sounds scammy. Your headline "Say Goodbye to Bookmarking Webpages" is good because it speaks to people who already use bookmarking services and find them lacking. But "Imagine never having to re-google what you had googled before" reaches a broader audience and also speaks to the actual problem they have.
- udayaprakash19 11y agoThanks for the kudos cooperadymas. We take a snapshot every time you visit the page. We don't version the page yet. Do you have a specific use case for a feature like that? There's a very strong correlation between time spent and usefulness of the article. We index all articles, even the ones you spend less time on, so when you search, a few page scrolls get you to the link you need. That said, time spent is a heuristic, its useful in a lot of cases, but not all, we'll have to see. "Proprietary algorithms", we have a patent pending on how we sort and filter data We'll think of a catchphrase around ""Imagine never having to re-google what you had googled before" Hope you enjoy using the extension. You can send us feedback from the plugin directly, or mail us at dev@tryheld.com
- spdustin 11y agoSomething like "don't re-search when doing research" maybe?
- sprremix 11y agoWhy would I switch to Fetch if I'm perfectly fine with using the default Google Chrome bookmark bar?
- udayaprakash19 11y agoIf you like using the default google bookmarks then probably will love using fetch. There are so many instances during which we forget to bookmark something and managing bookmarks is a nightmare in itself. Fetch streamlines all and makes finding links a breeze.
- fgtx 11y agowhat's the difference between this service and the one from Google (Chrome) described here? https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068?p=swaa&hl=en&authuser=0&rd=1#chromeapp https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068?p=swaa&hl=...
- udayaprakash19 11y agoFetch is focused on turning your browsing history into a searchable knowledge base. Fetch doesn't just index links, it indexes content as well, and it ranks them by time spent, which is very handy to find the links you need quickly.Coming soon you will be able to sign in with the same acc into mozilla and safari as well, your history across browsers will be clubbed together making it all the more valuable.
- olejorgenb 11y agoI've wanted something like this a long time, but cloud is a deal breaker for me. Anyone know of a similar local effort? (I spent 98% of my time on my own two machines anyway...)
- maha1979 11y agoIts pretty heavy running all the software on a local machine. Would consume resources and tons of storage. Maybe if you bought a server, it could work out. Or maybe we could set you up with a private server...just thinking aloud.
- encoderer 11y agoI've wanted this feature for a long time. But you're giving away gives me zero confidence that you'll be around in a year. Also something I've learned building a sass business: you need customer feedback. People who pay you money are properly motivated to give you the feedback you need.
- udayaprakash19 11y agoWe will be launching paid plans soon. If you like it so much please take it for a spin and mail me your thoughts to meat dev@tryheld.com. We use it internally and find it useful and wont be shutting down fully even in the worst case scenario,we may trim some features that is as far as we would go.
- dingaling 11y agoI've been trying to design something along these lines now that Firefox aggressively prunes history with no user override ( it keeps barely five days worth on my laptop ). However the main challenge is that much of the web is now SSL, so a light caching proxy isn't feasible unless it does MiTM which I don't want. My current idea is to log DNS lookups but that doesn't, of course, provide page content data.
- maha1979 11y agoThe Fetch backend works pretty much like a crawler, what Google sees, it sees...private content is not indexed, e.g. your gmail mails, but the titles are indexed so there is still some usefulness in the search. We may add functionality for the user to sign in to these services so we can index them. E.g. the user may add his google account ao we can index mails etc. Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
- atrophying 11y agoIt's a neat concept, but your privacy policy is going to kill you. It's incredibly boilerplate and vague, with no information about how you actually use the data. If you want security-conscious folks to use your service (that is, hackers from HN), please provide more information about how you actually plan to use the data and more robust language about security and transparency. There's no way in hell I'd let a third-party like yours access the entirety of my browser history without seeing some evidence of vigorous privacy protection first.
- maha1979 11y agoatrophying, we're working on a privacy page that lays out our privacy policy in user-friendly terms. Give us a couple of days to get this sorted. thanks for the input.
- nik61 11y agoUndoubtedly the attention lavished on this Extension by HN has caused its server to stop? Seems to be nothing happening here, I will pass on.
- maha1979 11y agoHi Nik, yes, we had some trouble with the load yesterday, you could try now if you like, its all sorted out.
- OJFord 11y ago> Imagine never having to re-google what you had googled before :) So.. instead of searching Google, I search Fetch? Meh, Google's already on my screen (address bar).
- pvinis 11y agoobviously you dont have the need for searching your history. searching on google is about finding something. searching your history is about finding something you already found once, spent time to do that, and is hard to find again by googling. my main need for searching history is when i look for apartments. i open 50-100, during a few days. then later im getting an answer from one of the owners, and i have to find the ad again. im not going to open all the ads avain, and of course the address is in the page content so i cannot search on tbe url bar. if i have a way to search my history with full text search on the page content too, that would be awesome. and im still looking for that app/extension that will allow me to do that with firefox..
- maha1979 11y agoFirefox version, coming your way soon! Care to connect at dev@tryheld.com? We'll keep you posted.
- pvinis 11y agoany plans for firefox addon?
- maha1979 11y agoDefinito! Can you connect at dev@tryheld.com? We'll keep you posted!
- techaddict009 11y agoHow will this work with the pages which have login?
- maha1979 11y agoIn the case of pages with login, Fetch will only be able to store the title of the page, but not the content. We are working on integrations to connect services to Fetch search, we currently have Gmail, Dropbox and Google Drive on our list. Any particular service you want search to be available on?
- drvortex 11y agoIs this a joke? You actually want people to upload their history to the cloud. People don't even want it on their own computers. That was the point of incognito mode!