

Show HN: Bookmarks.io - Full text search for your bookmarks (free trial) - shutton
http://www.bookmarks.io

======
marknutter
I've been using <http://historio.us> for quite some time now and really like
it. It's basically the same concept.

~~~
StavrosK
Thanks Mark, I'm glad you like it! (I'm the creator).

~~~
marknutter
It's been great. And I just realized I'm still on the free account so I
upgraded to premium for the year. Keep up the great work (and stay in
business, please :)!

~~~
StavrosK
Haha, don't worry, it pays for itself already! Thanks for the upgrade, I just
got the email :)

~~~
ju
Can you tell me pls, do you archive only HTML or also and other assets?

~~~
StavrosK
It's HTML only, as it's harder to cache other assets for every single page in
the user's list.

------
msohcw
Great idea. This is the kind of idea that falls into the 'why on earth did I
not think of that first' area. Just some comments though. Your call to action
is really camouflaged amongst the features. I'd suggest that you relocate your
call to action as a huge button where your 'Already have an account?' section
is. It could also do with more useful screenshots of the app itself. The app
itself confuses me slightly. Your usage of a separate modal kind of threw me
off. (I was thinking, is it a downloadable app? A webapp? An extension?) I'm
not sure if everyone would agree, but I personally don't need the extra huge
window for easy access to websites I commonly use. That never made sense to
me. If I commonly use a website, I'll probably already know its URL or name at
least. Your app's major value add for me is the ability to search for
bookmarks where I KNOW I BOOKMARKED IT but can't seem to find it in the mass
of them. Anyway, good job shipping! :) One question though, does the chrome
extension automatically sync bookmarks after the first import?

~~~
shutton
Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated.

I know what you mean about the call to action being camouflaged, I think we're
trying to be too clever, we should make it more obvious.

I don't think we're doing a good job of showing how the service should be used
either. The idea is you install the bookmarklet or browser extension and then
from any page on the internet when you launch the bookmarklet/extension the
modal window opens over the top where you can one-click bookmark that current
page or search your bookmarks etc.

The Chrome extension adds a feature to pull in all your Chrome bookmarks with
a single click.

~~~
hercynium
This is really great!

Years ago when I was still in college (so probably before 2001) I had this
exact same idea, but not the skills to implement it. Later, still wanting a
searchable archive of pages I bookmarked, I wrote a Perl script that fetched
every link in bookmarks.html into a SQLite database and indexed the content.
It was very hackish and not very smart (just indexed the raw HTML), but it
worked for my needs, kinda...

After a few years switching laptops and using multiple systems, I let it fall
by the wayside - copying the DB and scripts from one system to another and
keeping them all in sync was just too much of a PITA to be worth it to me...
I'm still a rabid bookmarker though, and your service looks like the
realization of all the stuff I _wanted_ to do!

If you offer a free-trial (say two weeks) of this service, I am _very_
interested in trying it and would certainly provide plenty of feedback. I'm
not yet convinced that I want to pay $3.99/month, but I don't think it's an
unreasonable amount at all, especially considering the iOS app, planned cross-
browser support, and the very slick-looking interface.

Add to the existing features some mechanism to automatically/transparently
sync new bookmarks, and add some assurance that the data is stored securely
and encrypted, and only used for new things with my express permission, that
$3.99 goes from _maybe_ to _deal_!

I'm excited for this - I see a viable business in it since I know I'm not the
only other data-packrat out there.

EDIT: I just saw the trial voucher and used it. Thanks!

~~~
shutton
Thanks for the comment, good to know you can see the potential.

You can use the voucher code HNTRIAL for a two month free trial, please let us
know what you think.

About the price. We've kept it high while we wait for Google App Engine to
announce their pricing for the text search feature we use. We do expect to be
able to charge less once we know their pricing (hopefully 25% to 50% less) at
which point we can announce our price drop.

------
arikrak
It makes sense to charge for a service like this which keeps a copy of the
page. But I wonder if there are services that just rely on Google and do some
form of Google custom search on your bookmarked pages.

It might be Google comes with such a service already. I was able to do a full
text-search of my Google History (<http://www.google.com/psearch>), but it
didn't work when I tried an old result from my bookmarks.

------
ddorian43
Cool project. Some questions:

Do you store a copy of the page (so you can still see it if the original is
deleted)?

Do you refresh the index? (to index the new comments in a web page)

Do you get the pages from a simple wget? (google groups don't work this way i
think?)

What technologies for the webapp backend and iphone?

Thanks

~~~
shutton
Yeah we do store a copy of the site (just HTML not other assets) but we don't
really offer archiving of the site at the moment. Currently any page gets re-
indexed when someone edits the meta data (title, description etc) that we
store with the bookmark. We could easily add a user 'reindex' button.

It's all built with Google App Engine using their Text Search feature.

------
shutton
This is my commuting project, looking for some feedback to see if my 'me too'
project has any chance of standing out. Thanks.

Edit: Use the voucher code HNTRIAL for a two month trial.

------
ruswick
This sort of thing never appealed to me. It seems sort of superfluous: with
good tagging and organization, you should be able to retrieve bookmarks with
ease. Paying for a service just seems wasteful, and I certainly have no
intention of subscribing to a service like this (even if I could afford it,
which I can't).

Moreover, it's fairly expensive as bookmarking services go. Pinboard offers
identical functionality for significantly less money. A few bookmarking
services offer search for free. I just can't comprehend how this product can
compete on price.

~~~
shutton
Fair point. Which free bookmarking services do you know that provide full
content search?

------
webwanderings
All the more power to more sites for bookmarking, but I cannot afford and I am
not paying. Good luck.

------
marshallford
I use Pinboard and it works just fine. titles, a description, and tags are
good enough search wise.

------
dmvaldman
I'm tangentially interested in full text search. What libraries are you using?

~~~
shutton
We've using Google App Engine and their Text Search feature
([https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/search/o...](https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/search/overview)).
It's still experimental and slightly buggy but very easy to use and obviously
scales well.

They haven't announced pricing for the service yet which is quite key since
search is our main feature.

------
matazj
Am I just looking at this the wrong way or is there no free trial?

~~~
shutton
There's no free trial from the site but I've just created the voucher code
HNTRIAL which should give the first 50 Hacker News readers a two month free
trial. Enjoy!

~~~
matazj
Thank you! Just yesterday I was looking for a good bookmark tool to use on my
work and home computers so I'm going to try this out.

~~~
shutton
No problem, just let us know what you think.

~~~
hammondos
nice project, similar to my commuting project bkmrx.com but with a nicer
design :)

~~~
shutton
Looks good. What's your plans with the site, are you going to start charging?

~~~
hammondos
Thanks - no plans to start charging as I essentially want it to grow into a
community-based search engine.

Largely a proof of concept for now, maybe one day in the future might charge
for indexing of private bookmarks, PDFs, etc, but those features aren't
currently implemented due to technical complexity.

On a related note I'm interested to see how www.lumi.do does as this is one of
the future feature possibilities I was thinking of for bkmrx...

------
toadi
So actually a google search is possible on the limit set of your bookmarks.
Why only search on this limit set when I look for something?

Secondly does it search a page in the version I bookmarked it?

~~~
shutton
Yeah, we just search the pages you've bookmarked. If you Google search for
'fish recipe' you'll get millions of results, if you do the same search on
your bookmarks you'll get just the fish recipes you've previously bookmarked.
It's no good for finding new fish recipes but great for quickly getting back
the fish recipe you've used before.

That's right, we search the version of the page when you bookmarked it.

