
Show HN: Fetch – A Chrome plugin to manage your history - udayaprakash19
https://getfetch.net
======
cpplinuxdude
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.

~~~
maha1979
Will do, thanks!

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atrophying
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.

~~~
maha1979
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.

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jeffehobbs
Stop trying to make "fetch" happen.

~~~
hamitron
rekt

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olejorgenb
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...)

~~~
maha1979
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.

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cooperadymas
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.

~~~
udayaprakash19
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
Something like "don't re-search when doing research" maybe?

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zuxfer
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.

~~~
maha1979
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](https://getfetch.net/privacy.html)

~~~
Bedon292
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?

~~~
HerpDerpLerp
Yes... indeed... "work related" things... yes that is the problem... no other
things... no.

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dingaling
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.

~~~
maha1979
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.

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encoderer
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.

~~~
udayaprakash19
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.

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Grue3
Why does this even need to be in the cloud? Firefox can already do most of
this offline.

~~~
udayaprakash19
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.

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OJFord

        > 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).

~~~
pvinis
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..

~~~
maha1979
Firefox version, coming your way soon! Care to connect at dev@tryheld.com?
We'll keep you posted.

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drvortex
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!

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

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

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nik61
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.

~~~
maha1979
Hi Nik, yes, we had some trouble with the load yesterday, you could try now if
you like, its all sorted out.

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fgtx
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=...](https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068?p=swaa&hl=en&authuser=0&rd=1#chromeapp)

~~~
udayaprakash19
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.

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

~~~
udayaprakash19
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.

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ad93611
Being able see my history sorted by amount of time I spend on a page sounds
like a good idea.

~~~
maha1979
Worked very well for our test user base of 30 users, hopefully it'll be useful
to others as well

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techaddict009
How will this work with the pages which have login?

~~~
maha1979
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?

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

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pvinis
any plans for firefox addon?

~~~
maha1979
Definito! Can you connect at dev@tryheld.com? We'll keep you posted!

