5 ms·

Show HN: Bookmarks.io - Full text search for your bookmarks (free trial)

25 points by shutton 14y ago

shutton 14y ago
This is my commuting project, looking for some feedback to see if my 'me too' project has any chance of standing out. Thanks. Edit: Use the voucher code HNTRIAL for a two month trial.
matazj 14y ago
Am I just looking at this the wrong way or is there no free trial?
- shutton 14y ago
  There's no free trial from the site but I've just created the voucher code HNTRIAL which should give the first 50 Hacker News readers a two month free trial. Enjoy!
  - matazj 14y ago
    Thank you! Just yesterday I was looking for a good bookmark tool to use on my work and home computers so I'm going to try this out.
    - shutton 14y ago
      No problem, just let us know what you think.
      - hammondos 14y ago
        nice project, similar to my commuting project bkmrx.com but with a nicer design :)
        shutton 14y ago
        Looks good. What's your plans with the site, are you going to start charging?
        cschmidt 14y ago
        It says "Only $3.95 a month" on the site, so I imagine that's the plan.
        hammondos 14y ago
        Thanks - no plans to start charging as I essentially want it to grow into a community-based search engine. Largely a proof of concept for now, maybe one day in the future might charge for indexing of private bookmarks, PDFs, etc, but those features aren't currently implemented due to technical complexity. On a related note I'm interested to see how www.lumi.do does as this is one of the future feature possibilities I was thinking of for bkmrx...
ddorian43 14y ago
Cool project. Some questions: Do you store a copy of the page (so you can still see it if the original is deleted)? Do you refresh the index? (to index the new comments in a web page) Do you get the pages from a simple wget? (google groups don't work this way i think?) What technologies for the webapp backend and iphone? Thanks
- shutton 14y ago
  Yeah we do store a copy of the site (just HTML not other assets) but we don't really offer archiving of the site at the moment. Currently any page gets re-indexed when someone edits the meta data (title, description etc) that we store with the bookmark. We could easily add a user 'reindex' button. It's all built with Google App Engine using their Text Search feature.
- shutton 14y ago
  Our mobile version is based on cheeaun's http://cheeaun.github.com/hnmobile/landing/ http://cheeaun.github.com/hnmobile/landing/ project but we're still working on it. We tried jQuery mobile but found it too slow, that was 6 months ago, maybe its improved.
msohcw 14y ago
Great idea. This is the kind of idea that falls into the 'why on earth did I not think of that first' area. Just some comments though. Your call to action is really camouflaged amongst the features. I'd suggest that you relocate your call to action as a huge button where your 'Already have an account?' section is. It could also do with more useful screenshots of the app itself. The app itself confuses me slightly. Your usage of a separate modal kind of threw me off. (I was thinking, is it a downloadable app? A webapp? An extension?) I'm not sure if everyone would agree, but I personally don't need the extra huge window for easy access to websites I commonly use. That never made sense to me. If I commonly use a website, I'll probably already know its URL or name at least. Your app's major value add for me is the ability to search for bookmarks where I KNOW I BOOKMARKED IT but can't seem to find it in the mass of them. Anyway, good job shipping! :) One question though, does the chrome extension automatically sync bookmarks after the first import?
- shutton 14y ago
  Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. I know what you mean about the call to action being camouflaged, I think we're trying to be too clever, we should make it more obvious. I don't think we're doing a good job of showing how the service should be used either. The idea is you install the bookmarklet or browser extension and then from any page on the internet when you launch the bookmarklet/extension the modal window opens over the top where you can one-click bookmark that current page or search your bookmarks etc. The Chrome extension adds a feature to pull in all your Chrome bookmarks with a single click.
  - hercynium 14y ago
    This is really great! Years ago when I was still in college (so probably before 2001) I had this exact same idea, but not the skills to implement it. Later, still wanting a searchable archive of pages I bookmarked, I wrote a Perl script that fetched every link in bookmarks.html into a SQLite database and indexed the content. It was very hackish and not very smart (just indexed the raw HTML), but it worked for my needs, kinda... After a few years switching laptops and using multiple systems, I let it fall by the wayside - copying the DB and scripts from one system to another and keeping them all in sync was just too much of a PITA to be worth it to me... I'm still a rabid bookmarker though, and your service looks like the realization of all the stuff I wanted to do! If you offer a free-trial (say two weeks) of this service, I am very interested in trying it and would certainly provide plenty of feedback. I'm not yet convinced that I want to pay $3.99/month, but I don't think it's an unreasonable amount at all, especially considering the iOS app, planned cross-browser support, and the very slick-looking interface. Add to the existing features some mechanism to automatically/transparently sync new bookmarks, and add some assurance that the data is stored securely and encrypted, and only used for new things with my express permission, that $3.99 goes from maybe to deal! I'm excited for this - I see a viable business in it since I know I'm not the only other data-packrat out there. EDIT: I just saw the trial voucher and used it. Thanks!
dmvaldman 14y ago
I'm tangentially interested in full text search. What libraries are you using?
- shutton 14y ago
  We've using Google App Engine and their Text Search feature (https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/search/overview https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/search/o...). It's still experimental and slightly buggy but very easy to use and obviously scales well. They haven't announced pricing for the service yet which is quite key since search is our main feature.
marknutter 14y ago
I've been using http://historio.us http://historio.us for quite some time now and really like it. It's basically the same concept.
- StavrosK 14y ago
  Thanks Mark, I'm glad you like it! (I'm the creator).
  - marknutter 14y ago
    It's been great. And I just realized I'm still on the free account so I upgraded to premium for the year. Keep up the great work (and stay in business, please :)!
    - StavrosK 14y ago
      Haha, don't worry, it pays for itself already! Thanks for the upgrade, I just got the email :)
      - ju 14y ago
        Can you tell me pls, do you archive only HTML or also and other assets?
        StavrosK 14y ago
        It's HTML only, as it's harder to cache other assets for every single page in the user's list.
toadi 14y ago
So actually a google search is possible on the limit set of your bookmarks. Why only search on this limit set when I look for something? Secondly does it search a page in the version I bookmarked it?
- shutton 14y ago
  Yeah, we just search the pages you've bookmarked. If you Google search for 'fish recipe' you'll get millions of results, if you do the same search on your bookmarks you'll get just the fish recipes you've previously bookmarked. It's no good for finding new fish recipes but great for quickly getting back the fish recipe you've used before. That's right, we search the version of the page when you bookmarked it.
ruswick 14y ago
This sort of thing never appealed to me. It seems sort of superfluous: with good tagging and organization, you should be able to retrieve bookmarks with ease. Paying for a service just seems wasteful, and I certainly have no intention of subscribing to a service like this (even if I could afford it, which I can't). Moreover, it's fairly expensive as bookmarking services go. Pinboard offers identical functionality for significantly less money. A few bookmarking services offer search for free. I just can't comprehend how this product can compete on price.
- shutton 14y ago
  Fair point. Which free bookmarking services do you know that provide full content search?
marshallford 14y ago
I use Pinboard and it works just fine. titles, a description, and tags are good enough search wise.
arikrak 14y ago
It makes sense to charge for a service like this which keeps a copy of the page. But I wonder if there are services that just rely on Google and do some form of Google custom search on your bookmarked pages. It might be Google comes with such a service already. I was able to do a full text-search of my Google History (http://www.google.com/psearch http://www.google.com/psearch), but it didn't work when I tried an old result from my bookmarks.
webwanderings 14y ago
All the more power to more sites for bookmarking, but I cannot afford and I am not paying. Good luck.

25 points by shutton 14y ago

This is my commuting project, looking for some feedback to see if my 'me too' project has any chance of standing out. Thanks. Edit: Use the voucher code HNTRIAL for a two month trial.

matazj 14y ago

Am I just looking at this the wrong way or is there no free trial?

shutton 14y ago
There's no free trial from the site but I've just created the voucher code HNTRIAL which should give the first 50 Hacker News readers a two month free trial. Enjoy!
- matazj 14y ago
  Thank you! Just yesterday I was looking for a good bookmark tool to use on my work and home computers so I'm going to try this out.
  - shutton 14y ago
    No problem, just let us know what you think.
    - hammondos 14y ago
      nice project, similar to my commuting project bkmrx.com but with a nicer design :)
      - shutton 14y ago
        Looks good. What's your plans with the site, are you going to start charging?
        cschmidt 14y ago
        It says "Only $3.95 a month" on the site, so I imagine that's the plan.
        hammondos 14y ago
        Thanks - no plans to start charging as I essentially want it to grow into a community-based search engine. Largely a proof of concept for now, maybe one day in the future might charge for indexing of private bookmarks, PDFs, etc, but those features aren't currently implemented due to technical complexity. On a related note I'm interested to see how www.lumi.do does as this is one of the future feature possibilities I was thinking of for bkmrx...

ddorian43 14y ago

Cool project. Some questions: Do you store a copy of the page (so you can still see it if the original is deleted)? Do you refresh the index? (to index the new comments in a web page) Do you get the pages from a simple wget? (google groups don't work this way i think?) What technologies for the webapp backend and iphone? Thanks

shutton 14y ago
Yeah we do store a copy of the site (just HTML not other assets) but we don't really offer archiving of the site at the moment. Currently any page gets re-indexed when someone edits the meta data (title, description etc) that we store with the bookmark. We could easily add a user 'reindex' button. It's all built with Google App Engine using their Text Search feature.
shutton 14y ago
Our mobile version is based on cheeaun's http://cheeaun.github.com/hnmobile/landing/ http://cheeaun.github.com/hnmobile/landing/ project but we're still working on it. We tried jQuery mobile but found it too slow, that was 6 months ago, maybe its improved.

msohcw 14y ago

Great idea. This is the kind of idea that falls into the 'why on earth did I not think of that first' area. Just some comments though. Your call to action is really camouflaged amongst the features. I'd suggest that you relocate your call to action as a huge button where your 'Already have an account?' section is. It could also do with more useful screenshots of the app itself. The app itself confuses me slightly. Your usage of a separate modal kind of threw me off. (I was thinking, is it a downloadable app? A webapp? An extension?) I'm not sure if everyone would agree, but I personally don't need the extra huge window for easy access to websites I commonly use. That never made sense to me. If I commonly use a website, I'll probably already know its URL or name at least. Your app's major value add for me is the ability to search for bookmarks where I KNOW I BOOKMARKED IT but can't seem to find it in the mass of them. Anyway, good job shipping! :) One question though, does the chrome extension automatically sync bookmarks after the first import?

shutton 14y ago
Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. I know what you mean about the call to action being camouflaged, I think we're trying to be too clever, we should make it more obvious. I don't think we're doing a good job of showing how the service should be used either. The idea is you install the bookmarklet or browser extension and then from any page on the internet when you launch the bookmarklet/extension the modal window opens over the top where you can one-click bookmark that current page or search your bookmarks etc. The Chrome extension adds a feature to pull in all your Chrome bookmarks with a single click.
- hercynium 14y ago
  This is really great! Years ago when I was still in college (so probably before 2001) I had this exact same idea, but not the skills to implement it. Later, still wanting a searchable archive of pages I bookmarked, I wrote a Perl script that fetched every link in bookmarks.html into a SQLite database and indexed the content. It was very hackish and not very smart (just indexed the raw HTML), but it worked for my needs, kinda... After a few years switching laptops and using multiple systems, I let it fall by the wayside - copying the DB and scripts from one system to another and keeping them all in sync was just too much of a PITA to be worth it to me... I'm still a rabid bookmarker though, and your service looks like the realization of all the stuff I wanted to do! If you offer a free-trial (say two weeks) of this service, I am very interested in trying it and would certainly provide plenty of feedback. I'm not yet convinced that I want to pay $3.99/month, but I don't think it's an unreasonable amount at all, especially considering the iOS app, planned cross-browser support, and the very slick-looking interface. Add to the existing features some mechanism to automatically/transparently sync new bookmarks, and add some assurance that the data is stored securely and encrypted, and only used for new things with my express permission, that $3.99 goes from maybe to deal! I'm excited for this - I see a viable business in it since I know I'm not the only other data-packrat out there. EDIT: I just saw the trial voucher and used it. Thanks!

dmvaldman 14y ago

I'm tangentially interested in full text search. What libraries are you using?

shutton 14y ago
We've using Google App Engine and their Text Search feature (https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/search/overview https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/search/o...). It's still experimental and slightly buggy but very easy to use and obviously scales well. They haven't announced pricing for the service yet which is quite key since search is our main feature.

marknutter 14y ago

I've been using http://historio.us http://historio.us for quite some time now and really like it. It's basically the same concept.

StavrosK 14y ago
Thanks Mark, I'm glad you like it! (I'm the creator).
- marknutter 14y ago
  It's been great. And I just realized I'm still on the free account so I upgraded to premium for the year. Keep up the great work (and stay in business, please :)!
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    Haha, don't worry, it pays for itself already! Thanks for the upgrade, I just got the email :)
    - ju 14y ago
      Can you tell me pls, do you archive only HTML or also and other assets?
      - StavrosK 14y ago
        It's HTML only, as it's harder to cache other assets for every single page in the user's list.

toadi 14y ago

So actually a google search is possible on the limit set of your bookmarks. Why only search on this limit set when I look for something? Secondly does it search a page in the version I bookmarked it?

shutton 14y ago
Yeah, we just search the pages you've bookmarked. If you Google search for 'fish recipe' you'll get millions of results, if you do the same search on your bookmarks you'll get just the fish recipes you've previously bookmarked. It's no good for finding new fish recipes but great for quickly getting back the fish recipe you've used before. That's right, we search the version of the page when you bookmarked it.

ruswick 14y ago

This sort of thing never appealed to me. It seems sort of superfluous: with good tagging and organization, you should be able to retrieve bookmarks with ease. Paying for a service just seems wasteful, and I certainly have no intention of subscribing to a service like this (even if I could afford it, which I can't). Moreover, it's fairly expensive as bookmarking services go. Pinboard offers identical functionality for significantly less money. A few bookmarking services offer search for free. I just can't comprehend how this product can compete on price.

shutton 14y ago
Fair point. Which free bookmarking services do you know that provide full content search?

marshallford 14y ago

I use Pinboard and it works just fine. titles, a description, and tags are good enough search wise.

arikrak 14y ago

It makes sense to charge for a service like this which keeps a copy of the page. But I wonder if there are services that just rely on Google and do some form of Google custom search on your bookmarked pages. It might be Google comes with such a service already. I was able to do a full text-search of my Google History (http://www.google.com/psearch http://www.google.com/psearch), but it didn't work when I tried an old result from my bookmarks.

webwanderings 14y ago

All the more power to more sites for bookmarking, but I cannot afford and I am not paying. Good luck.