

Ask HN: Please review our startup: historious - StavrosK

historious is basically a search engine for sites you have bookmarked. Think of it as a cross between delicious and google, you bookmark something and the entire content of the page becomes searchable.<p>It's at http://historio.us/<p>I have posted it here once before, and you guys were very helpful, giving a deluge of very good suggestions. Right now I'd like to ask for your opinion on the pricing model.<p>Our model right now is a free option, which has a limit of 1000 bookmarks for a month, and then it becomes unlimited. This is to avoid people coming in, importing their 20,000 bookmarks and leaving, never to return.<p>There are also some extra features here: http://historio.us/pricing/<p>The main problem, and what we'd like your feedback on, is that every bookmark a user adds is expensive, as we have to store the entire page. Right now the service is profitable, but we'd like to improve it so we can scale it better.<p>What features would make you pay for it? What sort of things would turn you away from it as a free user with a mind to convert later on?<p>A good point we heard for not having a bookmark limit is that, even with 1,000 bookmarks, users would think twice before bookmarking something, and we don't want that.<p>Any feedback you could give is greatly appreciated!
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woodall
I really enjoy using Historio.us. Here are some features I might consider
paying for:

Update notifications. Store the page content, url, and date I historified a
document. Alert me to any changes in the document; sort of like an RSS feed.
Use the wiki format to display changes in the document.

I also like being able to see all my links at once. I am playing around with
an idea here[1]. I know there is an "iframe = bad" mentality, but most places
use them- more so with the ajax web. If all my links were to the right and
there was a blank iframe that I could load them in on the histrio.us website
you keep users on your page longer and increase your traffic. Combine this
with the updated views and you have a nice little tool.

I would also like some metrics tools- why store it and not doing any thing
cool. Maybe the ability to put pages in sets and query those sets for
keywords, images, ect. Do something different than google
bookmarks/delicious/et al.

Better facebook/twitter integration. Until you get on the social bookmark list
and have your icon plastered on pages you should offer this directly. A icon
beside an already historified link to facebook or twitter would be enough for
a user to know what it is there for. "Jane just historified URL".

Other than that I am content with it just the way it is now. Keep up the good
work.

[1] <http://christopherwoodall.com/trendy/>

~~~
StavrosK
Thank you very much, both for your feedback and praise!

Your idea is very very good, and there are many things we can do, especially
with document clustering (grouping similar documents), automatically generated
keyword clouds, etc etc. We are trying to get the service to a good, stable
level for now, and then we'll devote more time to playing with new ideas.

One such idea we're considering is have the search interface be a filter,
where the results are continuously decreasing, in real time, as you type more
and more keywords.

We already have Twitter integration (as in, posting things to Twitter when you
historify them). We also want to add Facebook integration, but its priority is
a bit lower right now.

Thanks again, we add all ideas to our wishlist and are very happy to implement
most of them (it just might take some time)!

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buro9
I use Google Bookmarks: <http://www.google.com/bookmarks>

It already merges my personal "Web History" (things I search for on Google)
with my actual bookmarks (things I click 'bookmark' on a bookmarklet -
[http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=100215)
).

The key feature of Google bookmarks is that searching the bookmarks always
searches the content of all bookmarked pages and the web history pages. It
returns the results with bookmarked pages at the top, and web history below.

It also has tags (they call them labels) and collections (they call them
lists), and collections are shareable, and tags are searchable (find X only in
Erlang tagged bookmarks).

You can import bookmarks from other services, and export all bookmarks to XML
(one of the reasons I stay with Google is that they _allow_ me to move).

My question to you is: What do you offer that trumps that functionality that I
already have? Why should I move? Snowman?

~~~
StavrosK
Well, the snowman _is_ pretty awesome... There are other features, such as the
ability to share bookmarks on your personal site
(<http://stavros.historio.us/>) for an example, automatically add things to
"read later", one-click bookmarking, automatic sharing...

A few features that are coming are the ability to import RSS feeds from other
places, as well as more social elements (and, of course, support).

For you, though, David, I'll throw in a free subscription!

~~~
buro9
Actually... I've just tried your site end-to-end and you do have a killer
feature and it's not the thing you are making most prominent.

The killer feature is the cache.

To know that what I bookmark will have a snapshot at that moment in time,
citable and impervious to changes that happen to the source.

That is a fantastic feature.

My advice to you would be to highlight that. Bookmarks against things that can
and will change, disappear or move are moving targets... what you're offering
here is a permanent bookmark as it stood at that moment in time.

That's a big deal, definitely enough to make me consider trying it out. But
you need to communicate that this is possible... it would really help
researchers and those who use bookmarks as a searchable source over a long
period of time (which is when the effects of things changing becomes most
obvious).

I think you should possibly look at features like verifying a source (it looks
like you cache from the browser, which the user could've modified) and
allowing tags to be shared with other users or publicly. Basically... allow
academics to use this and to include web citations in their papers and such
with histori.us providing the verified cache.

Perhaps even extend the bookmarking functionality to include the ability to
highlight and add notes to part of the bookmarked page.

Permanent cache = big deal.

~~~
StavrosK
Ah, thanks for that, you're right in that we don't publicise it almost at all
(and we should). As for the sharing, you have your personal historious at:

<http://buro9.historio.us/search/>

You can publish sites there (including tags) and refer people to it by giving
them a link of the form <http://buro9.historio.us/?q=some+query>. Personally,
I think that's pretty handy for answering the question "do you have any sites
about X?"

No items are made public by default, but do note that, when you _do_ make an
item public, you are also sharing the cached version.

Thanks again for the feedback, and I'm good for that free subscription if you
need it!

~~~
buro9
I've thought about it some more.

Beware and embrace the slashdotting (insert digg, reddit, HN here).

The cache is both your killer feature and your risk. I hope it's statically
stored or can be put in memory quickly... are you using Varnish?

Encourage it's use... if people are bookmarking using histori.us and a site
goes down, you've just gained a very large audience to your service. But only
if your site survives the onslaught itself.

~~~
StavrosK
We are using Varnish, but we're storing the sources in the DB (to take
advantage of automatic compression and all-around ease). It's trivial to get
Varnish to cache the entire source and invalidate the cache when the document
changes (the public/private setting, basically, so it doesn't accidentally
share a page that's been changed to private), so that's all good.

The biggest problem (by far) is disk usage. The rest of the service is very
easily sharded, really, as every user is isolated. Solr is also fantastic
(much better than Sphinx, in hindsight we should have gone with that for TP),
so that can also scale very well (there's even an implementation of it on
hadoop).

We'll add the caching feature to the front page as soon as we finish the
current round of A/B testing, thanks again (that feature was basically an
afterthought, so it was great that you noted its importance)!

~~~
buro9
Until the TP ref I wondered whether it was you. Hi again :)

~~~
StavrosK
It is, hi :)

------
Madhav_
I absolutely love historious. I've using it for about a month now and I can't
imagine life without it.

I like the fact that you don't need to sign in with the bookmarklet
(contrasted with instapaper).

The incredibly clean interface is another draw for me. A lot of these other
sites are all "web 2.0"ish and to me it's bothersome.

I don't really like the chromium extension. I dunno, I think it's kinda
useless seeing as though it's off to the side, whereas the bookmarklet is
right on top of what I'm viewing. Also I like the notification window of the
bookmarklet better than the extension. The window when a "page has already
been indexed" on the extension is a bit annoying. I'd like to see maybe a
keyboard shortcut for the extension, I think that would make it killer.

A couple things that I would like would be to search through a time range,
also better browser integration would be nice. i.e. having pages show up under
the autocomplete. The ability to select multiple items would be nice. Having a
text only view (a la instapaper, readability). Also I wish there was a shorter
url, I always spell historious wrong.

thanks!

~~~
StavrosK
Thank you very much for your feedback, it really is the best part of the day
when a user tells you they like the service!

It's perfectly fine if you prefer the bookmarklet over the extension, as we
spent more time working on it (it affects more users)! We absolutely want to
add a shortcut, but don't know how to do it in Chrome yet (some research is in
order).

You can already search for time ranges (the syntax is a bit weird, though),
it's "added:[2010-07-01T00:00:00Z TO 2010-08-01T00:00:00Z]", for example.

We are also planning to support better autocompletion, as well as bulk
edits/deletions. I have never seen the text-only view, but it sounds like a
good idea, I'll take a look now! As for the URLs, we also have historius.com
and historious.net. Unfortunately we don't have historious.com for symmetry :/

Thanks again!

------
DavidPP
I just did the sign-up. I hate having to wait for the activation email, then
click activate then having to "relog".

Sometime when this happen, I don't even go further and never even try the
service. Do you you really need to wait for me to click an "activate" link
before letting me try your service ?

~~~
StavrosK
Hmm, thank you for that. We don't really need emails to be verified, it's just
for forgotten passwords. I'll see if we can get it removed right away, thank
you.

EDIT: We've changed the signup process to log you in immediately after
activating, and we'll remove the activation requirement soon, thank you!

------
ryan_au
I'd be interested in your approach to competing with services like Delizzy
(<http://www.delizzy.com/>). Easy full text search of my Delicious bookmarks
is a huge draw-card for me.

The main advantages I see you having versus Delizzy are:

\- Privacy (they require your Delicious username and password)

\- Being able to snapshot the page as you read it

The main disadvantages I see you having versus Delizzy are:

\- They integrate with Delicious

------
RiderOfGiraffes
Clickables:

<http://historio.us/>

<http://historio.us/pricing/>

~~~
StavrosK
Thank you, is there any way to edit the post to make them clickable?

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
URLs in submissions don't get linked, URLs in comments do. If you want your
URLs to be clickable, add a comment, just as I did.

This isn't a shot at you specifically because it happens again and again and
again and again, but I'm constantly surprised, _constantly_ surprised that
people like yourself who have been here for _months_ don't know the rules.
It's something you simply need to know, something that you learn from spending
time here, and wondering "I wonder why that happens."

~~~
StavrosK
And now I know!

I still can't figure out when the downvote arrow appears, though.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
From the FAQ at the bottom of every page:

<http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html>

    
    
        Why don't I see down arrows?
    
        There are no down arrows on submissions. They only
        appear on comments after users reach a certain karma
        threshold.

~~~
StavrosK
That's the odd thing, I saw them one day and then they went away again. It's
no big deal, I was just wondering, thank you.

------
pbhjpbhj
Niggling:

>The best part: It's completely free!

It's not completely. I think you've over marketed that bit, would "It's free"
do, or even "You can use it free forever" (I know, but it's clear IMO that
forever is curtailed by heat-death of the universe, business ending and the
like).

~~~
StavrosK
Hmm, thank you for that. It's a remnant from the days before subscriptions,
we'll see about changing it (even though it depends on what one means by
"completely", i.e. "not forcing you to sign up" vs "all features").

~~~
pbhjpbhj
On the 'net with companies one hasn't previously used I think the barrier for
"this company might be scamming me" is so low that anything that looks like a
half-truth should be avoided. But it's probably just me!

------
kmfrk
As someone who uses Opera with its own native bookmark manager and
synchronizer, why is would I choose your service?

I haven't wrapped my mind around your concept completely yet, and I didn't get
any hits by searching on your demo, so ... :)

~~~
StavrosK
About the demo, we should make it more obvious, but there's a hint that says
"try searching for historious". We can't include too many things in there, as
everyone searches for different things and we'd never get it all :/

~~~
kmfrk
I just tried some things like Obama and thought that it would have something
on that. Oh well. :)

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KevinMS
I use <http://wheatt.com>

It has tags, but nothing social about it, a more nerdy command line type
interface, and because its mine :)

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d0m
You _really_ should have a look at _Wajam_ which is another startup that seems
to have the same goal as you. They do it differently thought.

~~~
StavrosK
Thank you, I'd never heard of them! I'll have a look right away.

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mkramlich
neat functionality idea!

