Show HN: I built a full-text search for your browsing history

Gives me really bad vibes, sending all your browsing history, page info, etc. to some server, including screenshots of your tabs.

You also say it doesn't save in incognito but I can't find anything in the source code to support that claim.

I see a bunch of other red flags too, like no obvious monetization, the privacy policy saying updated in 2021, but then a little bit further down it says updated in 2019 (neither makes sense as the domain was registered in 2023), privacy policy sometimes says Nision Research LLC and sometimes Nision Research Kft, the chrome web store page has an email for "gethaystack.com" but the privacy policy says info@browspilot.com (and that gethaystack site has a policy saying "info@localhost"), both of the reviews on the chrome web store are by people clearly affiliated with browspilot, the FAQ says you can't delete things from your history, privacy policy doesn't say where your data gets sent (i see mentions of firestore, firebase in the code, but it does not appear in the privacy policy)

Also this claim on your home page "Your data will only be read and used by you." doesn't align with what your privacy policy says.

Why do I need to log in with Google to use it? I'm also experiencing a bug where after logging in, I see the same login popup over and over again.

I’d love to hear your feedback – please share your thoughts and suggestions in the comments!

This reminds me… some time ago I made my own Firefox extension to do full-text search of all my webpages. It’s in three parts: a server running in the background to interface with an SQLite database, a minimal extension to send text to that server, and a little GUI to query the database.

Unfortunately, all this makes it an utter pain to set up. It’s also somewhat specialised to my own very minimal needs. When I’ve mentioned it in the past, people have suggested open-sourcing it, but for these reasons I’ve resisted it. This post now makes me wonder if I should look into ways to improve it…

Where is my data stored?

One of the features I wish Kagi had was the ability to search through my previous search queries. More details here: https://kagifeedback.org/d/4065-query-personal-search-histor...

Maybe Browspilot could fill this gap!

One thing I noticed is my search history is like a zero-effort personal journal. It gave me a detailed glimpse of what I was doing/thinking on a certain day from several years ago.

browsers stagnate by their monoculture, this feature should've been part of a browser (and local to the machine) 20 years ago and here we are adding WebMIDI and webUSB support when we cant even find shit we looked at 3 days ago.

I've been looking for something like this, but as a desktop app that runs locally. So far I've only found two:

1. HistoryHound - https://www.stclairsoft.com/HistoryHound/index.html

2. BrowserParrot - https://www.browserparrot.com/ (sadly seems abandoned)

Wish I could find something like these but open-source. Both of them parse your browser history, fetch the pages, and build their own index. Would be a "safer" and more space/cpu-efficient alternative to apps like Windows Recall and Rewind.ai.

How do you plan to make money? The obvious answer would be selling people's data. What is your alternative?

Browspilot is a neat tool built by Peter and his team to help you find anything you've seen online with just a clue or by scrolling through your past activity. It's super handy for pulling up frequently used pages or digging up old stuff without keeping a bunch of tabs open.

Whether you're a student or a busy professional, just type in a bit of what you remember, and it’s there. Plus, exciting features are on the way, like searching across different apps and finding things based on meaning with advanced tech.

Overall, Browspilot makes finding online content a breeze!