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Hey HN, we're Ian and Nik and we're a bit obsessed with data. Specifically, being able to own your own data and make it useful. We're rethinking how we interac

Hey HN, we're Ian and Nik and we're a bit obsessed with data. Specifically, being able to own your own data and make it useful. We're rethinking how we interact with and manage all the data in our lives. Data is all over the place now (computer, mobile, multiple cloud providers...) and it's more than a bit unwieldy. Not only is it unwieldy, you can also lose access to your data at the drop of a hat due to an outage, a policy change, or a bug. This doesn't sit well with us. Of course, to really tackle this problem will be the work of years, so we're starting with something more manageable. We've created a tool to aggregate all your browser history and make it full-text searchable. If you've read something online, you should be able to find it again—quickly. There's plenty of prior art in the search-your-own-history space, so why might you care? When we tried to find an existing product to fit our needs we were unable to find something that checks all of these boxes: - All history, from all browsers. - Fast. It should feel more like autocomplete than like web search. - Completely local. No need to trust someone's server. - No user input required. I.e. no need to bookmark. Store everything. - No limits. Don't delete my history unless I say so (browsers will delete your history after a few months, 4 months for Chrome). I'm sure we've missed a few though. How do you keep track of everything you've read online? Any workflows or killer hacks you've discovered? edit: formatting

_Chief 5y ago
This is great! Can't wait to give it a try. Waiting for the Windows version though. Does the electron GUI need to be open for it to fetch the data, or can it do that as a background service as well, for example if one just wanted an always up to date persistory.db to use directly? For example an api server and a custom browser extension consuming it, or are these also being considered for browserparrot
- iansinnott 5y ago
  Heh, ah yes windows. Definitely want to support this. Will be a bigger lift than Linux, but definitely something we'd like to support (we both have windows boxes too so there's a bit of skin in the game). Regarding the GUI, good question. The GUI does _not_ need to be open. There's a background process that periodically copies new history from the various sqlite databases into the BrowserParrot db. In Activity Monitor this process appears as "core." I know, terribly ambiguous name. It was originally named for the Clojure namespace where that bit of code lives, but renaming the process to make it more clear what's running is on our backlog. Can also find the process via `lsof -i :44444`.

_Chief 5y ago

This is great! Can't wait to give it a try. Waiting for the Windows version though. Does the electron GUI need to be open for it to fetch the data, or can it do that as a background service as well, for example if one just wanted an always up to date persistory.db to use directly? For example an api server and a custom browser extension consuming it, or are these also being considered for browserparrot

iansinnott 5y ago
Heh, ah yes windows. Definitely want to support this. Will be a bigger lift than Linux, but definitely something we'd like to support (we both have windows boxes too so there's a bit of skin in the game). Regarding the GUI, good question. The GUI does _not_ need to be open. There's a background process that periodically copies new history from the various sqlite databases into the BrowserParrot db. In Activity Monitor this process appears as "core." I know, terribly ambiguous name. It was originally named for the Clojure namespace where that bit of code lives, but renaming the process to make it more clear what's running is on our backlog. Can also find the process via `lsof -i :44444`.