Yes, I've only recently rediscovered using the browser history for this exact purpose and it hasn't failed me yet.

It would be remarkable and interesting to have a super deep search capability that indexes all first-order links on this site.

This already exist: "searching over the titles, text and URLs of sites you've visited before" -- https://www.browserparrot.com/

Mac-only

And you think that hasn't been made yet? :-D

Show HN: DeepHN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26791582

Of note, I was able to find that item (which I recalled existed but not by what name) with hn.algolia, but I was not able to find it with the OP search engine, or with the DeepHN search itself. So in my book, Algolia is winning.

But projects like this are super fun and educational to build so props to OP.

OP said they only indexed the past 6 months.

Perhaps someone will be able to help me find a website I’ve been trying to Google for with no luck: the main focus of the website is a music player with 3D pipes and arrows that the camera would follow along, live rendering the entire scene while music was playing, but it was also a personal blog if you scrolled down. Domain was relatively short and I think it started with K.

Currently it's indexing the content of stories and comments. Are you suggesting also to index the content of the main story link (which is outside HN)?

That is what they're suggesting, yes.

maybe add metadata to the index, but not the full page content, else you're just gonna build another google

How so? There's no PageRank in sight here, very little spam to worry about or contend with.

browser history seems to only save the last 3 months of history. It used to be many years of data but that also slowed the browser down.

Ditto. I somewhat recently learned that Safari only keeps the history log for one year unless you explicitly set "Remove history items" to "manually." Which I've done so that I at least have a list that I could crawl in the future to build a full text index on.

I'm fairly confident every single major browser (and probably most minor) have a history limit of some sort. Sometimes it's age, sometimes it's # of entries.

Usually I'm only looking back the past week or three.

Otherwise I snapshot the page to evernote when I think it might be interesting later. Hopefully they don't completely end the free tier.

I think Microsoft is working on that right now :p

That’s exactly what it sounded like to me.

Of course, local/offline only would be great.

Lol you're describing Microsoft's recall feature that everyone here is saying is the death of privacy

If Recall was open source and auditable, and didn't send any data at all about usage to the internet, I guess that would be fine.

Otherwise, no thanks.