3 ms·

Sure! Story: So I was doing a usability study with someone and they were saying how they couldn't find a particular document (I think it was a pitch deck) anyw

Sure! Story: So I was doing a usability study with someone and they were saying how they couldn't find a particular document (I think it was a pitch deck) anywhere even though they'd tried for 20 minutes the day before. They were able to it after a few seconds in Haystack - it turns out they'd mispelt the name so it didn't come up in Drive, GMail or Slack when they looked for it! Mobile: Fair point, our 'splash page' supports mobile which you can see here: https://www.haystackapps.com https://www.haystackapps.com Tech Stack: So they extension is written in pure javascript using a framework I designed for some internal stuff I did for a previous company. We then use Babelify and Uglifiy to compile it into usable code. The web server is written in Node, but its very simple as it just hosts the splash page and generates tokens for the extension. Appreciate the questions, let me know if you give it a try and if we can make it better for you!

misterman0 8y ago
IC. But how can an extension like your's search through gmail better than gmail's own search? Or better than slack's? Do you use their api's? Did you roll your own full-text search?
- cdouglasosborn 8y ago
  Great question! I wouldn't say if you're just looking for something in Gmail that we will be better. The main benefit is that you're able to search through all of them in one place. The way it works is, we show you "instant" results from files/documents that we have cached from your providers and your browser history. However, we also show you below that results that come direct from Gmail, Slack, Drive...etc. That way if we don't find the result you're after, you're able to see the same results as if you'd opened up all the tabs and performed the searches in each tool as well. We do this using their OAuth search functionalities. We do do full text search for documents that you have visited in the past, and the cloud providers often do this as well so that helps ensure we can find you good results. One big difference is that our search uses a less precise search, which means we support spelling mistakes, different ordering...etc. Which can help us find documents that are hard to find.

misterman0 8y ago

IC. But how can an extension like your's search through gmail better than gmail's own search? Or better than slack's? Do you use their api's? Did you roll your own full-text search?

cdouglasosborn 8y ago
Great question! I wouldn't say if you're just looking for something in Gmail that we will be better. The main benefit is that you're able to search through all of them in one place. The way it works is, we show you "instant" results from files/documents that we have cached from your providers and your browser history. However, we also show you below that results that come direct from Gmail, Slack, Drive...etc. That way if we don't find the result you're after, you're able to see the same results as if you'd opened up all the tabs and performed the searches in each tool as well. We do this using their OAuth search functionalities. We do do full text search for documents that you have visited in the past, and the cloud providers often do this as well so that helps ensure we can find you good results. One big difference is that our search uses a less precise search, which means we support spelling mistakes, different ordering...etc. Which can help us find documents that are hard to find.