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In information retrieval, this is known as a "known item search". Sue Dumais from Microsoft Research and her team wrote a seminal paper on this entitled "Stuff

by jll29 4y ago

In information retrieval, this is known as a "known item search". Sue Dumais from Microsoft Research and her team wrote a seminal paper on this entitled "Stuff I've Seen". It is surprising that modern browsers innovate so little - for example they do not have a mode that searches only URLs you have previously visited, which would obviously massively help with known item search.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
> It is surprising that modern browsers innovate so little - for example they do not have a mode that searches only URLs you have previously visited, which would obviously massively help with known item search. What's worse, they don't have a useful list of those URLs anyway[0], not anymore - both Chrome and Firefox have some ridiculously short and (AFAIK) not configurable window of browsing history. At this point they could do away with the history tab completely, as it's perfectly calibrated to be useless: the links are dropped just as they cross the threshold between "likely still have it open in a tab" and "what was that thing I saw the other day?". -- [0] - Locally. I'm sure Google has it on their servers, but it's meant to help advertisers, not users.
- sandbags 4y ago
  This. Why does my browser not keep history forever, I surely have space for it? Why doesn’t it archive every page it can? And build a full-text index of every page so that I can be reasonably sure I can lay my hands on something I’ve seen, even if the original is now gone. I can only conclude that the people working on browsers aren’t interested in what goes on in a browser.
- SaltyFetus 4y ago
  It's a truly unbelievable state of affairs. Browsers are THE app, but I cannot even ask nicely to store my own history? I so badly want an extension to store all my phone and computer browser history, just URLs and Page Titles for all time so I can search it. How does this not exist? Much less be built in... Page text would be even better, but all I know that have attempted this have failed.
Dyac 4y ago
Memex solves this problem. Allows you to search your history or bookmarks by page content, not just title. https://memex.garden/ https://memex.garden/

by jll29 4y ago

TeMPOraL 4y ago

> It is surprising that modern browsers innovate so little - for example they do not have a mode that searches only URLs you have previously visited, which would obviously massively help with known item search. What's worse, they don't have a useful list of those URLs anyway[0], not anymore - both Chrome and Firefox have some ridiculously short and (AFAIK) not configurable window of browsing history. At this point they could do away with the history tab completely, as it's perfectly calibrated to be useless: the links are dropped just as they cross the threshold between "likely still have it open in a tab" and "what was that thing I saw the other day?". -- [0] - Locally. I'm sure Google has it on their servers, but it's meant to help advertisers, not users.

sandbags 4y ago
This. Why does my browser not keep history forever, I surely have space for it? Why doesn’t it archive every page it can? And build a full-text index of every page so that I can be reasonably sure I can lay my hands on something I’ve seen, even if the original is now gone. I can only conclude that the people working on browsers aren’t interested in what goes on in a browser.
SaltyFetus 4y ago
It's a truly unbelievable state of affairs. Browsers are THE app, but I cannot even ask nicely to store my own history? I so badly want an extension to store all my phone and computer browser history, just URLs and Page Titles for all time so I can search it. How does this not exist? Much less be built in... Page text would be even better, but all I know that have attempted this have failed.

Dyac 4y ago

Memex solves this problem. Allows you to search your history or bookmarks by page content, not just title. https://memex.garden/ https://memex.garden/