It would be nice if browsers had the ability to let you search their web-page cache. For example, I might remember that I reading something about chocolate in the last few days, but not remember where I had read it. Scrolling through the list of visited urls is a decidedly suboptimal way to find what I'm looking for. This idea is just crying out for a mozilla plugin, if it hasn't been done already.
If I were to "productize" this idea (as opposed to just making a quick hack), I'd take it even further. Rather than just searching the cache, you could incrementally build an index of which urls contained which words. Since the index would take a lot less space than the original web pages, it could remember documents that had long since been flushed from the cache.
Posted on January 22, 2004 11:23 AM
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Maybe this link gives you some ideas:
http://battellemedia.com/archives/000249.php
I couldn't agree more, I've been longing to do the same thing.
Not too long ago I discovered logging for IM conversations and IRC, and now those logs are an indispensable resource to me. I can often solve technical problems I have, for instance, by search the logs of IRC channels about Linux or whatever.
I really wish I could say the same for the web pages I visit.
Posted by: pat at January 23, 2004 05:27 AMKim, there are indeed a few projects like this, in various stages of incompleteness:
- Les Orchard's AgentFrank
- Kevin Smith's ptolemy
- Gerald Oskoboiny's squid hack - well, I guess grepping your archived cache counts as a search engine, kind of (incidentally, Gerald wrote the W3C HTML validator, and he shot a mean game of pool at the Ottawa-area Mozilla 1.0 release party)
Oops, I think I may have subconsciously stolen Jorrit Wiersma's idea. I aggregate his blog, and apparently he posted about this idea on the same day as I did. Sorry!
Posted by: kim at January 26, 2004 05:59 PMCould that be... post-attribution? Hah!
(sorry. I make my own fun)
Posted by: Gnomon at January 27, 2004 10:19 AMWhy not use the "Index service" in windows XP
Posted by: jaymemaurice at December 8, 2004 07:33 PM