Re:Show HN: Newtiny - Record your Web History and Search any...
by kuldeep_kap on Tuesday March 01, 2011 @03:09AM
(#2274730)
It all comes down to the search. I know we have a lot of work to do on that front.
Bookmarking mostly never worked for me, because like you pointed out in the example, you may never know what information you might have to recall.
We may come up with a way to 'star' a link to help bring up the favorite pages.
Re:Show HN: Newtiny - Record your Web History and Search any...
by corin_ on Tuesday March 01, 2011 @03:46AM
(#2274780)
As a non-Chrome user I'm not your target audience anyway - but if you were doing it for Firefox (or if I were a Chrome user), it would take a lot of very positive endorsements to get me interested enough to really try it out. Until then I'll settle with the fact that browser history will very rarely be the best way to find something I've seen before - most of the time I will have bookmarked what I later want to re-read, so it's not a huge issue anyway.
I love how I can search history through the address bar to find a site that I know the title or URL of (which, therefore, i wouldn't really have much trouble finding through a search engine if I lost my history), but I find that actually searching for a lost link in browser history is absolutely horribly.
Yesterday evening I got into an argument with a colleague over how GSM works (Vodafone's network in the UK had severe downtime in many areas for much of the day), and I wanted to look up an article I had read in the last month or so about the man who thought up SMS, and his quotes on why it was limited to 160 characters.
It wasn't interesting enough for me to want to bookmark at the time, but it would have been useful last night. I spent about ten minutes trying to find it (through searching for keyworks in the history, to looking for related HN topics, as I know I found that article through a link from this site - eventually I was just scrolling down the list at what I think was roughly the date on which I might have read it).
I definitely read it on this computer, in this browser, within a time period that it is still in my history. Somewhere, but I sure as hell don't know where.
Eventually I gave up and bothered to Google it, what a surprise, it took me hardly any time to find what I wanted.
Afterthought: Maybe the Google should offer to archive your history and provide a search engine of just pages that you've viewed. We get a much better way to trace our footsteps, Google get even more data with which to target adverts towards us, win win.