Comment by olejorgenb
9 hours ago
Off topic, but ref
"I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a website, type that into Google, and get taken to the article you were looking for"
It's funny to me that (to my knowledge) no browser (mainstream?) implement this functionality yet. Seems like a no brainer to index what the user have actually seen... (Could even be restricted based on viewport - I don't think it's that crazy of an idea)
I know there's a a number of third party programs which does though. Of course - multi-device being the norm - complicates things.
>It's funny to me that (to my knowledge) no browser (mainstream?) implement this functionality yet. Seems like a no brainer to index what the user have actually seen...
The answer to this is complicated.
Both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge actually implement this. Behind the scenes, both will upload your browser history to the cloud. You can see it in network packet captures. It's implemented in the browser for the vendor, but not for the user.
The choice to not implement this for the user is very deliberate. It's contrary to the vendor's interests if the browser provides this capability directly to users. If a user's browser can take you to a website directly, then you are not using the vendor's search engine, meaning you are not looking at their ads, paid search results, algorithm, etc. It would severly impact their business model.
This is also the reason why browsers have:
- Adopted Google Chrome's "Omnibar" instead of a separate address bar and search bar.
- Implement only basic hierarchical organization for browser Favorites.
Directly and indirectly, Google is the central nexus of all modern browsers. Aside from Google Chrome, they also:
- Fund the vast majority of Firefox.
- Pay Apple for preferential treatment.
- Provide the same mechanisms to vendors who base their browsers on Chromium (i.e., Microsoft Edge, Brave).
I would love for this to not be the case. There is hope to be found in small independent browser and search companies/projects.
Never thought about this, but it makes sense they don't want a better local search, just for users to rely more on their product. It's messed up - so much time and human potential wasted on poor search and ads.
Thank you! I was wondering why bookmarks are treated so poorly by browser, as if they are forced to include them but hate them with a passion. That explains it. I'm a bit of a bookmark hoarder to the point where I have a local html file that holds and displays all my bookmarks and I've got that page set as my default.
> Adopted Google Chrome's "Omnibar" instead of a separate address bar and search bar.
On the other hand, the additional tools in the Omnibar (calculator is the example most should be familiar with) makes the bar incredibly useful for random daily tasks. Also, it seems that there is an "omnibox" API that extensions can use, which allows them to add their own tools to the omnibar/omnibox. Would be interesting as a form of "assistant" in a way.
>Both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge actually implement this. [...] both will upload your browser history to the cloud.
I'm fairly certain I've caught Firefox doing something similar (regularly sending multiple tens of MB to Google servers in the background.)
So fwiw, browsing history shouldn’t be anywhere near that big making it unlikely there what it was. It compresses well, if they were to do it I’m sure they’d do it at regular intervals instead of a years’ worth at a time, etc.
And, of course, Firefox is open source and this wouldn’t be kept a secret.
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> Both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge actually implement this. Behind the scenes, both will upload your browser history to the cloud. You can see it in network packet captures. It's implemented in the browser for the vendor, but not for the user.
Citation needed... (I'm talking about the page *content*, not the metadata like url and title)
> both will upload your browser history to the cloud
I wonder if the EU could fine them a couple weeks of revenue for this. Seems illegal.
I'm 80%+ sure the claim is BS
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There are things like Mymind (SaaS) or Karakeep (selfhosted) that do this, though they require you to explicitly save the pages instead of indexing everything by default
I haven't used this but looks someone created a self hosted version of Microsoft's Recall
https://github.com/openrecall/openrecall
I would really like to see integration between Karakeep and SearXNG so that I could combine online search engine results with my self-hosted bookmarks serice.
There's an old Mac app that tried to do it. History hound. It sometimes worked
If only some operating system incorporated a way to make everything you've seen on your computer locally searchable, wouldn't that be a neat feature?
I believe there some projects trying this now using OCR IIRC.
Did even Microsoft try something like this? It's of course something you'd only want running locally
I think the joke is that Microsoft did do something very like this -- they call it Windows Recall -- and it got a lot of angry pushback. (Partly, IIRC, because the specific way they did it initially was very bad in terms of security and privacy, but I think a lot of people quite understandably don't trust them to implement it (a) the way they claim they do or (b) competently, so even after they made a bunch of changes aimed at making it less scary it's still viewed with a lot of hostility.)
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> no brainer to index what the user have actually seen... I know there's a a number of third party programs which does though
Which company would you trust with this kind of deep surveillance information on you though?
I would trust Firefox if they made a version which did the indexing locally. I think I'd trust chrome as well as long as it was implemented locally.
That's called search: in history.
That doesn't search the content of the pages you've browsed, though, right?
Right, I misunderstood the case.
I guess because it isn't then trivial for a web browser to do, indexing every text ever rendered?
I think you would need to take it a step further and do full-text search on loaded pages. It's certainly possible but probably pretty data intensive.
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