Show HN: Fetch – A Chrome plugin to manage your history

https://getfetch.net

by udayaprakash19 • 11 years ago

29 44 11 years ago

getfetch.net

zuxfer• 11 years ago

okay, why should I let a third party access my browsing history?

Big player already do that.Why should I trust a small party too?

Not being cynical, just wanted to see if the payoff is worth the compromise.

maha197913• 11 years ago

Hey Zuxfer,

I'm the developer of the extension.

Totally valid point, we thought a lot about privacy, and our approach to managing the issue is two fold

1. Your browsing history isn't identifiable on our databases since we use a random hash from your credentials to track your history. 2. We have absolutely no interest in using the data, even non-identifiable data for marketing purposes 3. We leave the final control in your hands, if you feel your privacy is breached, you can clear all your data from our servers and uninstall the extension.

Here's our privacy policy for reference - https://getfetch.net/privacy.html

maha197913• 11 years ago

Also, to answer why an extension for Browser History:

1. Fetch indexes page content as well as the titles and URLs of your history, making it easy to find links 2. Fetch ranks search results by engagement which means the most useful links usually surface on top when you search.

Bedon292• 11 years ago

Not to be overly critical, but it sounds like you are asking us to just trust you with no proof of your claims.

How do we know that you in fact have properly randomized the hashes, really aren't using the data, and most importantly, how do we know you really are clearing the data from your servers when we ask you to? Are you going to make the source code available?

If its running on your servers, you have to plan to monetize right? How do you plan on doing that?

Edit: I should note it looks quite cool, and I am probably going to try it, but was wondering about the above points.

One additional question. Is it possible to ban specific sites from showing up? Like work related intranet things?

udayaprakash196• 11 years ago

Imagine hypothetically today you are researching a router. You would look up youtube video reviews, look it up in amazon may be craigslist, checkout consumer reports etc. The next day if want those links you will either comb your browser history or go those sites you visited again. But with fetch all you have to do is type the name of the router and it will show the links in descending order of time you have spent on various websites associated with the router :) Imagine the time saved :D

Already__Taken• 11 years ago

Does fetch aggregate the logged time you've looked at the pages that you're now looking at to find the same page you found before and ruining all the results?

ad93611• 11 years ago

Being able see my history sorted by amount of time I spend on a page sounds like a good idea.

maha197913• 11 years ago

Worked very well for our test user base of 30 users, hopefully it'll be useful to others as well

_lce0• 11 years ago

OT but .. I love the rubik loading[0] intro!!

[0] https://getfetch.net/img/status.gif

cpplinuxdude• 11 years ago

Or how to have 1984 running in your web browser. :)

But some people don't care about their privacy any longer, because, well we probably have none at this point anyway.

So in for a penny, in for a pound.

Edit:

Consider putting something about privacy right at the top of the page, if such a feature exists. e.g all bookmarks are encrypted, and only the user has the key, or whatever.

maha197913• 11 years ago

Will do, thanks!

jeffehobbs• 11 years ago

Stop trying to make "fetch" happen.

hamitron• 11 years ago

rekt

Grue3• 11 years ago

Why does this even need to be in the cloud? Firefox can already do most of this offline.

udayaprakash196• 11 years ago

We see the amount of links amassed by a person over time is his knowledgebase of sorts and we want it make it available to the user where ever he wants. We will be launching a mobile app soon, where in you can sign in and find any link from your history.

lucaspottersky• 11 years ago

thanks, but i'm already happy with my data & soul being sold by Google & Facebook. /sarcasm

cooperadymas• 11 years ago

Privacy concerns aside, it seems like a really useful service.

How do you handle page versioning? Do you take a new snapshot every time I visit - and do you keep the most recent version or can I look at/search through previous versions?

Ranking pages by how much time you spend on them seems great from a productivity standpoint. From a search standpoint, often the pages I want to go back and find ex post facto are the ones that I only looked at for a few seconds. So maybe it's still helpful? Yet to be seen!

A little feedback on the page copy. Any time someone claims they have "proprietary algorithms" it sets off alarms. It's empty jargon, and sounds scammy. Your headline "Say Goodbye to Bookmarking Webpages" is good because it speaks to people who already use bookmarking services and find them lacking. But "Imagine never having to re-google what you had googled before" reaches a broader audience and also speaks to the actual problem they have.

udayaprakash196• 11 years ago

Thanks for the kudos cooperadymas.

We take a snapshot every time you visit the page. We don't version the page yet. Do you have a specific use case for a feature like that?

There's a very strong correlation between time spent and usefulness of the article. We index all articles, even the ones you spend less time on, so when you search, a few page scrolls get you to the link you need. That said, time spent is a heuristic, its useful in a lot of cases, but not all, we'll have to see.

"Proprietary algorithms", we have a patent pending on how we sort and filter data

We'll think of a catchphrase around ""Imagine never having to re-google what you had googled before"

Hope you enjoy using the extension. You can send us feedback from the plugin directly, or mail us at dev@tryheld.com

spdustin• 11 years ago

Something like "don't re-search when doing research" maybe?

sprremix• 11 years ago

Why would I switch to Fetch if I'm perfectly fine with using the default Google Chrome bookmark bar?

udayaprakash196• 11 years ago

If you like using the default google bookmarks then probably will love using fetch. There are so many instances during which we forget to bookmark something and managing bookmarks is a nightmare in itself. Fetch streamlines all and makes finding links a breeze.

fgtx• 11 years ago

what's the difference between this service and the one from Google (Chrome) described here? https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068?p=swaa&hl=...

udayaprakash196• 11 years ago

Fetch is focused on turning your browsing history into a searchable knowledge base. Fetch doesn't just index links, it indexes content as well, and it ranks them by time spent, which is very handy to find the links you need quickly.Coming soon you will be able to sign in with the same acc into mozilla and safari as well, your history across browsers will be clubbed together making it all the more valuable.

olejorgenb• 11 years ago

I've wanted something like this a long time, but cloud is a deal breaker for me.

Anyone know of a similar local effort? (I spent 98% of my time on my own two machines anyway...)

maha197913• 11 years ago

Its pretty heavy running all the software on a local machine. Would consume resources and tons of storage. Maybe if you bought a server, it could work out. Or maybe we could set you up with a private server...just thinking aloud.

encoderer• 11 years ago

I've wanted this feature for a long time. But you're giving away gives me zero confidence that you'll be around in a year.

Also something I've learned building a sass business: you need customer feedback. People who pay you money are properly motivated to give you the feedback you need.

udayaprakash196• 11 years ago

We will be launching paid plans soon. If you like it so much please take it for a spin and mail me your thoughts to meat dev@tryheld.com. We use it internally and find it useful and wont be shutting down fully even in the worst case scenario,we may trim some features that is as far as we would go.

dingaling• 11 years ago

I've been trying to design something along these lines now that Firefox aggressively prunes history with no user override ( it keeps barely five days worth on my laptop ).

However the main challenge is that much of the web is now SSL, so a light caching proxy isn't feasible unless it does MiTM which I don't want.

My current idea is to log DNS lookups but that doesn't, of course, provide page content data.

maha197913• 11 years ago

The Fetch backend works pretty much like a crawler, what Google sees, it sees...private content is not indexed, e.g. your gmail mails, but the titles are indexed so there is still some usefulness in the search. We may add functionality for the user to sign in to these services so we can index them. E.g. the user may add his google account ao we can index mails etc. Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

atrophying• 11 years ago

It's a neat concept, but your privacy policy is going to kill you. It's incredibly boilerplate and vague, with no information about how you actually use the data.

If you want security-conscious folks to use your service (that is, hackers from HN), please provide more information about how you actually plan to use the data and more robust language about security and transparency. There's no way in hell I'd let a third-party like yours access the entirety of my browser history without seeing some evidence of vigorous privacy protection first.

maha197913• 11 years ago

atrophying, we're working on a privacy page that lays out our privacy policy in user-friendly terms. Give us a couple of days to get this sorted. thanks for the input.

nik61• 11 years ago

Undoubtedly the attention lavished on this Extension by HN has caused its server to stop? Seems to be nothing happening here, I will pass on.

maha197913• 11 years ago

Hi Nik, yes, we had some trouble with the load yesterday, you could try now if you like, its all sorted out.

OJFord• 11 years ago

    > Imagine never having to re-google what you had googled before :)

So.. instead of searching Google, I search Fetch? Meh, Google's already on my screen (address bar).

pvinis2• 11 years ago

obviously you dont have the need for searching your history. searching on google is about finding something. searching your history is about finding something you already found once, spent time to do that, and is hard to find again by googling. my main need for searching history is when i look for apartments. i open 50-100, during a few days. then later im getting an answer from one of the owners, and i have to find the ad again. im not going to open all the ads avain, and of course the address is in the page content so i cannot search on tbe url bar. if i have a way to search my history with full text search on the page content too, that would be awesome.

and im still looking for that app/extension that will allow me to do that with firefox..

maha197913• 11 years ago

Firefox version, coming your way soon! Care to connect at dev@tryheld.com? We'll keep you posted.

pvinis2• 11 years ago

any plans for firefox addon?

maha197913• 11 years ago

Definito! Can you connect at dev@tryheld.com? We'll keep you posted!

techaddict009• 11 years ago

How will this work with the pages which have login?

maha197913• 11 years ago

In the case of pages with login, Fetch will only be able to store the title of the page, but not the content. We are working on integrations to connect services to Fetch search, we currently have Gmail, Dropbox and Google Drive on our list. Any particular service you want search to be available on?

drvortex• 11 years ago

Is this a joke? You actually want people to upload their history to the cloud. People don't even want it on their own computers. That was the point of incognito mode!

Show HN: Fetch – A Chrome plugin to manage your history

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