4 ms·

One alternative view on history that I think could be very useful, is a graph showing not just where I was, but also how I got there and where I went. It happen

by jorams 10y ago

One alternative view on history that I think could be very useful, is a graph showing not just where I was, but also how I got there and where I went. It happens fairly often that I remember reading something through, say, HN, but I have no clue where the actual post was. Right now the best solution is to search for related words in my history and hope there isn't too much noise, or to search the site I remember coming from. That's incredibly suboptimal. In fact, this is probably the reason I like Tree Style Tab[1] so much. Instead of a simple list, it shows my tabs in the context I opened them from. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

nachtigall 10y ago
> but also how I got there and where I went The tails project experiments with this in Servo and browser.html: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/lossless-web-navigation-with-trails-9cd48c0abb56 https://medium.freecodecamp.com/lossless-web-navigation-with... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13518919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13518919
lmkg 10y ago
Ok, this is one of those ideas that is clearly dumb but still just might work... you could hack a personal history report out of Google Analytics. You create a browser extension that adds the GA pagetag to every site you visit. Have the Client ID isolated by tab, but persist from one domain to another, so every tab is reported as a different "User." Then you can use the Behavior Flow reports to see the next-page/previous-page/next-domain/previous-domain data for everything you viewed! This of course has the enormous caveat that now all your browser history is setting in a Google Analytics account, instead of just only on the browser. But considered Congress just allowed your ISP to sell that data anyways, maybe that's not such a big drawback anymore?
- cpeterso 10y ago
  Mozilla prototyped something like that back in 2014 called the "Interest Dashboard". The extension is no longer supported however. http://www.ghacks.net/2014/11/14/firefoxs-interest-dashboard-provides-you-with-internet-interest-information/ http://www.ghacks.net/2014/11/14/firefoxs-interest-dashboard...
  - cvwright 10y ago
    This is very neat. Thank you! > The extension is no longer supported however. Sad. Unfortunately that's all too common...
- hackuser 10y ago
  > you could hack a personal history report out of Google Analytics It's interesting that many businesses (and probably governments) have better access to a user's browsing history than the user.
newman314 10y ago
Let's expand that further. I would like to do a custom search of the content of sites that I have visited. Oftentimes, I'll remember I read something in the past few days, then it's a mad scramble to open various links to try to figure out if it's the right one.
- amjith 10y ago
  There is a chrome extension for that: https://github.com/lengstrom/falcon https://github.com/lengstrom/falcon
  - newman314 10y ago
    This looks interesting. Thanks. Other use cases that I have are: * I want to be able search all content & comments of HN submissions that I have either upvoted or saved. * Want to search all the content of items saved in Pocket
- cvwright 10y ago
  This. Susan Dumais at Microsoft had a project called "Stuff I've Seen" [1] in the early days of desktop search. In a nutshell, it's indexing and information retrieval on the data that you use in your daily life -- web browsing, calendar events, etc. I've often thought about trying to re-implement some of their ideas with a local caching proxy or a browser extension. If there's an open source attempt at this already, I'd love to hear about it. [1] http://susandumais.com/SISCore-SIGIR2003-Final.pdf http://susandumais.com/SISCore-SIGIR2003-Final.pdf
- bkudria 10y ago
  There is http://fetching.io/ http://fetching.io/
azinman2 10y ago
Sounds a bit like a project we worked on for a while until various VC convinced us that getting people to change browsers was impossible, especially since you can't change the default on iOS: http://www.azinman.com/#/stateless/ http://www.azinman.com/#/stateless/
mthoms 10y ago
It's Chrome only but "GraphiTab" might be of interest for you: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/graphitabs/dcfclemgmkccmnpgnldhldjmflphkimp?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/graphitabs/dcfclem...

by jorams 10y ago

nachtigall 10y ago

> but also how I got there and where I went The tails project experiments with this in Servo and browser.html: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/lossless-web-navigation-with-trails-9cd48c0abb56 https://medium.freecodecamp.com/lossless-web-navigation-with... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13518919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13518919

lmkg 10y ago

Ok, this is one of those ideas that is clearly dumb but still just might work... you could hack a personal history report out of Google Analytics. You create a browser extension that adds the GA pagetag to every site you visit. Have the Client ID isolated by tab, but persist from one domain to another, so every tab is reported as a different "User." Then you can use the Behavior Flow reports to see the next-page/previous-page/next-domain/previous-domain data for everything you viewed! This of course has the enormous caveat that now all your browser history is setting in a Google Analytics account, instead of just only on the browser. But considered Congress just allowed your ISP to sell that data anyways, maybe that's not such a big drawback anymore?

cpeterso 10y ago
Mozilla prototyped something like that back in 2014 called the "Interest Dashboard". The extension is no longer supported however. http://www.ghacks.net/2014/11/14/firefoxs-interest-dashboard-provides-you-with-internet-interest-information/ http://www.ghacks.net/2014/11/14/firefoxs-interest-dashboard...
- cvwright 10y ago
  This is very neat. Thank you! > The extension is no longer supported however. Sad. Unfortunately that's all too common...
hackuser 10y ago
> you could hack a personal history report out of Google Analytics It's interesting that many businesses (and probably governments) have better access to a user's browsing history than the user.

newman314 10y ago

Let's expand that further. I would like to do a custom search of the content of sites that I have visited. Oftentimes, I'll remember I read something in the past few days, then it's a mad scramble to open various links to try to figure out if it's the right one.

amjith 10y ago
There is a chrome extension for that: https://github.com/lengstrom/falcon https://github.com/lengstrom/falcon
- newman314 10y ago
  This looks interesting. Thanks. Other use cases that I have are: * I want to be able search all content & comments of HN submissions that I have either upvoted or saved. * Want to search all the content of items saved in Pocket
cvwright 10y ago
This. Susan Dumais at Microsoft had a project called "Stuff I've Seen" [1] in the early days of desktop search. In a nutshell, it's indexing and information retrieval on the data that you use in your daily life -- web browsing, calendar events, etc. I've often thought about trying to re-implement some of their ideas with a local caching proxy or a browser extension. If there's an open source attempt at this already, I'd love to hear about it. [1] http://susandumais.com/SISCore-SIGIR2003-Final.pdf http://susandumais.com/SISCore-SIGIR2003-Final.pdf
bkudria 10y ago
There is http://fetching.io/ http://fetching.io/

azinman2 10y ago

Sounds a bit like a project we worked on for a while until various VC convinced us that getting people to change browsers was impossible, especially since you can't change the default on iOS: http://www.azinman.com/#/stateless/ http://www.azinman.com/#/stateless/

mthoms 10y ago

It's Chrome only but "GraphiTab" might be of interest for you: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/graphitabs/dcfclemgmkccmnpgnldhldjmflphkimp?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/graphitabs/dcfclem...