January 26, 2008

WebMynd Could Change the Way You Bookmark Websites

Michael Arrington

99 comments »

A new YCombinator startup called WebMynd launched today. It’s a Firefox add-on that records every website you visit and saves a virtual copy on your hard drive.

The service doesn’t save just an image of the page or the URL, but the full text site. That means you can also search those virtual pages later when you are looking for something.

Users can turn off recording at any time, and can delete saved pages that they don’t want to have around for any reason. To see saved pages, you click on an icon at the top of the browser and the local saved copies pop up, along with a search bar.

The idea is that, like Gmail, good search means you don’t have to spend a lot of time bookmarking and tagging websites to find them later. WebMynd records everything in the background, and a quick search will locate the page.

One thing I’d love to see added is a text box somewhere on the browser where you can type in tags to describe any page you are on, and to have that data saved along with the virtual page. The result could make searching easier down the road.

The basic add-on is free and keeps pages for a week. Users pay $10 for six months of history or $20 for a full year. After testing this I can tell it’s a service I’ll continue to use to quickly find sites I visited. Simple service, basic business model, and useful. Classic YCombinator stuff.

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  1. Luke

    What about (Kerry) Beagle? It does just that and more. And it’s free.

  2. WebSideVentures

    How are they going to monetize this?

  3. Michael Arrington

    Luke - the key here is absolute ease of installation and use.

    WSV - dude, read the last paragraph.

  4. Devrim Demirel

    It reminds me of Looksmart’s FURL (http://www.furl.net/).

    (And this startup seems to be experiencing Techcrunch effect.

    Service Temporarily Unavailable
    The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later)

  5. Michael Arrington

    oh yeah…furl. except it didn’t automatically record, did it?

    I profiled Furl on June 19, 2005, eight days after starting techcrunch. :-)

    http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/06/19/profile-furl/

  6. Neil

    Did you notice any slow down, Mike? I could imagine an automated site-saving service would only cause FF to hog more resources. Isn’t that why browsers already have a limit to their history logs?

    Performance questions aside, is there much utility in offering the ability to back track through your own browsing history from 6 - 12 months ago? If I want to go back to a site, I know where I usually start, and it begins with a G (and it also involves a quick search to locate the page). I use my Google search box more than the bloomin’ URL bar…

  7. Michael Arrington

    no slow down for me.

  8. Michael Long

    I prefer the Furl approach, more to the point the “quick furl” button where one simply punches a button for things they want to remember.

    I really don’t want some system wasting disk space by recording EVERY page I visit, as I read too much junk online as it is.

    Plus Furl works in Safari.

  9. Cyndy Aleo-Carreira

    This sounds like a bug, not a feature. It would be one thing if it saved at a remote location, utilizing something like EC2, but on my hard drive? Even as a text file, I’d be willing to bet within three months it would kill my laptop hard drive. Any given day, I have upwards of 60-some-odd tabs open in my Firefox window alone, and I clear it down to five by day’s end. And probably 75% of those sites would NEVER need to be seen again.

    I thought we were supposed to be moving AWAY from these huge information dumps and into apps that helped us parse relevance? The thought of having to clean these files out as well as my regular file cleaning, cookie removal, and email dig-outs gives me the willies.

  10. Ryan Spahn

    Could i just not create a firefox searchbox that searches my cache and get the same thing?

    Maybe Im missing the difference between creating a Firefox search box (with logo) to search cache and this?

    Difference here is that it is not saving it in cache and saving your pages on their server like Foxmarks?

  11. Anuj

    Could this be web 3.0?
    http://groups.google.com/group.....ring-sites

  12. oxymoron

    “Classic YCombinator stuff.”

  13. Chris

    If this saves the pages to my own HD and not to the web, then why do I have to pay them more to be allowed to store a greater amount of history? It’s not their storage that’s being used, it’s mine.

    Someone will make a free version of this. I’m not sure why they think it’s a viable business to pay for what you already have.

  14. gyula csocsan

    it seems to be a good idea

    the question, how long will this program keep the log (if the older visits disappear after a while)

    after a while the search will take very long

  15. Joshua Walters

    OR

    I could just let the Google browser sync record all my history.

    Then I could proceed to use an extension like Stealther when I dont want to have pages saved in my history, that way they are never deleted.

    I dont know, this just seems like a fancy history feature, which I have always felt was kinda useless.

    Of course, I bookmark everything, and everything has a folder. I tend to have between 200-500 bookmarks, depending on how recent I have reinstalled Windows and not backed them all up.

    Now that I use Browser Sync, that hasnt really been a problem.

  16. Caprese

    Failure!
    Charging for bookmarking my stuff?
    It is like Google charging for every search.

    Preposterous!

  17. George

    I think it’s a great idea.

    Saving your web surfing on your own hard drive is a good move from a privacy standpoint. If you think your hard disk is going to blow from this than you live in 1995. 15 lines of text takes about 1Kb of disk space. So if you browsed 60 URLs a day for 10 years you would end up with a whopping 15MB file!

  18. OperaFirstAgain

    Exactly this is built into Opera, from 9.5 Beta, for free …

  19. WebMynd Founders

    Thanks for all the interest. We just wanted to clear up some of the questions people have raised

    1. Copies of pages are kept on your hard drive so that in future versions you will be able to view your collections offline. For those concerned about storage we plan to offer archiving options so that you can decide how much storage or for how long things get saved on your HD.
    2. WebMynd is different than using a search of your browser cache because it is visual and takes advantage of the brains ability to quickly recognize previously viewed graphics.

  20. OperaFirstAgain

    http://www.google.com/search?q.....+search%22

  21. Tony

    I would ban their Bot from spidering my site - I dont want the entire content copied.

  22. AnonTroll

    If this proves to be at all useful someone will just write a Firefox plug in that does it for free.

  23. Richard Crowley

    Questions of disk space and whether you’d want to remember *everything* aside, the service is useless beyond one year’s use. The point of bookmarking is permanence. I can count on my del.icio.us bookmarks being around forever (at the bear minimum the copy in my Firefox extension will persist if the service ever goes away). This is bookmarking with Alzheimer’s — a true step backwards.

  24. lawrence

    @16. i agree

    who’d pay for a premium bookmarking service?
    we all like bookmarks, but c’mon…

  25. Zack

    The key to this product is that it is a simple install and “just works.” I really like the visual history scrolling, it kinda feels Apple-ish. I can see alot of people using this.

  26. Tony Wright

    Congrats to the WebMynd guys. Very cool stuff (and they’ve got a lot more on the horizon).

  27. i am under age

    I LIKE THE CONCEPT.

  28. i am under age

    agree with others. I will sure use it if it is free. but not for now… but the concept is really cool. I guess any other company who clone this and offer it for free would win.

  29. feel my steel

    uninstalled: went into an endless “cannot get content in frame” loop when checking my yahoo mail (i know, i know, switch to gmail…)

  30. ZOMGPWN!

    Chargie no likee. It’s kinda nifty though. I just Furl’d it. lulz.

    btw WebMynd needs to work on their Google rank!

  31. Otis Gospodnetic

    What happens when I go to work? My bookmarks stay at home? Bad, no?

  32. Ryan

    Congrats to the WebMynd team! Great product. Looking forward to seeing what features you add next.

  33. Stanley Miller

    Seems like a good idea, but will the pages stored will be of little value to most. You see - most information online is temporal in nature. Using this tool makes it too easy to save infomation. Saving should be difficult - that way you are forced to make a judgement about it’s future value.

    Most will end up with a harddrive of junk.

  34. kk

    Sort of like controlc.com - One of the main programmers of invision power board coded it.. Brandon Farber I think. Anyways you can sign up with the code ” beta4040 “

  35. Ben Strackany

    I could see two nice uses for this:
    - if I were bad at bookmarking, and I wanted to find “that one site about the linux cron options I remember seeing a few weeks ago”
    - if I were good at bookmarking, but I wanted to find something not based on the page title, or my brief notes, but on the page content itself.

    Granted, I could see someone making a free version. Or perhaps a service that hooks into your del.icio.us bookmarks & allows a full-text search of all the referenced urls.

  36. Otis Gospodnetic

    Ben:
    Simpy allows full-text search in bookmarks

  37. Raymond

    Caprese:
    They are charging for the good service that they are offering you. Like TiVo itself, they are charging you for the service they offer.

    I rather pay for a good service than flashing me plenty of advertisements. Lets just wait and see, the service is still developing and it still need to have a lot of improvements.

    I like to see some social aspect so it can go viral, like social tag searching. No username required, so as to not invade the privacy of another person’s activities.

  38. techmine

    What about using multiple computers, cellphone browsing?
    Is there any way to sync atleast 3 devices ? Yeah for that you need server sync and nobody wants their browser history online.

  39. Wills

    Spotlight in Leopard indexes the text of every site you visit and is searchable. However, on finding a result it simply gives you the URL for matches to a query. So you can’t read the stuff offline.

  40. OperaFan

    Nice feature - the latest Opera Browser beta basically does the same thing out of the box (and free of course):
    It creates a full-text index of all words on all pages you ever visit.

    So, in addition to what WebMynd does, you have that full-text index for split-second searches available!

    Way to go, Opera! ;)

  41. Imao

    Mike - something that you have failed to mention in relation to this service are the copyright implications of storing full websites on your hard-drive? Whats more, they are charing you to do it! You would have to have a serious “legal review” of this site for storing full websites - everything stored - and charging you for it.

    Not sure I would be all that happy with a service that downloads a fullsite to a hard-drive, quickly, easily which can then be parsed via desktop programs and reuploaded to other sites?

    My 2 cents…..

  42. Jeff

    Despite all the hoopla created by TC on new SB tools, I continue to love Furl. I’ll be the first to admit that it hasn’t added a whole lot of bells and whistles lately, but it’s still the best on the market. I’m not so sure I want a) automatic saves and b) to pay for a bookmarking tool. I saw that Looksmart recently sold findarticles.com to CNET. Be interesting to see if they’ll offload Furl too.

  43. Amit Agarwal

    I guess Google Desktop lets you search through your web history as well.

  44. Zaid

    #41
    Shouldn’t be a problem. “Fair use”.

  45. Larry Larrikin

    This isn’t a service, it’s hobbled software that you have to keep paying for in perpetuity. It will soon be overshadowed by a free, open-source version or built right into the next version of FireFox. Or built into the next version of the google toolbar to be used in conjunction with google desktop (for free!)

    The way this thing should work to have any value is to have WebMynd hit the same URLs as you do and keep a copy of the content on their servers. That’s a service. Google would be ideally placed to offer this with little effort.

  46. johns

    I don’t know about this. I also have a lot of tabs open daily and jump around a lot. Much of what I visit, I have no real interest in going back to it in the future. If I do find something I like, I put the link in my bookmarks and use X1 to find it. If I want to save an actual page, I use the FF Scrapbook plug-in.

  47. Marc

    Oh please!

    This was done in the ’90s! It’ll make as much money now as it did then. Was anyone at YCombinator even around in the 90s?

    Hmmm… what’s the expression about history? Something along the lines of, those who are doomed to repeat it.

  48. Asshole muthafucka

    THIS IS BULLSHIT CRAP… “THATs ALL!!

  49. fernando

    Damn it . . . Michael A, why are you such an arrogant SOB? Can’t people just leave comments without your condescending follow-up remarks? Keep your day job creating great blog posts, and leave the commentary to masses.

  50. damon

    simple site, simple service, simple business model, simple to implement

    so a free version for unlimited history will show up soon and then the simple business model goes poof

  51. Johnny Longsmith

    Interesting idea.
    To those that think this will be a space hog, you need to go back to your college and demand a refund.
    The complete works of shakespeare can be compressed to a text file in under 2MB.
    You can have wonderfully small and fast text search engines. I have written a similar script which updates all of my pages in realtime into a Lucene index and it absolutely flies.

    This is well done, web 2.0(fu) .Kudos to the developers.

    Well executed old idea!

  52. Pratham

    Why does Webmynd store css, images, js of the web pages on the hard disk ?
    I’ve been using it for an hour and the data directory size is 50Mb+.

  53. Anti Cloud

    Yikes… let’s see, everyone is pushing apps to the cloud, and this is pushing the cloud on to my hard drive… that is potentially going to stay in one place, prone to crashing.

    Jonny Longsmith - I don’t know about you, but in addition to viewing Shakespeare’s works with the images turned off, I view pages with images. They are gonna be > 45 - 50 easy, some 300 - 400K

  54. Imao

    @44 - “fair use” is fine for the digital millennium act in the states.

    Most other countries don’t fall under this - so its a problem for these guys.

    F.

  55. trk

    Well, I have developed something similar (all your history is stored in a Database in YOUR sever). It is a free package.Check it out here: http://history.sansj.com

  56. Tenders

    I use Furl in Safari for this. It also means I only save the stuff I’m interested in as I definitely don’t want to go back to every site I’ve ever visited!

  57. Blah

    Sounds like content theft. What’s next WebMynd will put ads on all the content they stole? What if all the TechCrunch stuff was copies and WebMynd put their own ads on it?

  58. Woostersoz

    Check out http://www.hooeey.com - it automatically records your web hops across computers and browsers - it also gives you the flexibility to decide which parts of this history should be uploaded to a central repository (while also allowing tags and comments on every link that has been recorded).

    Once you have uploaded your history, you can share all or parts of it with connections as well as create WebTours (slideshows of your journeys thru the web) and share them - interesting !

  59. Don Jones

    When the marginal cost of delivering another item is zero, the price point will ultimately reach zero…Same in this business model. It’s just selling storage = commodity business. Hope their venture capital guys or Ycombi don’t lose too much money.

  60. roland

    From the Google web history log in page:

    “You know that great web site you saw online and now can’t find? From now on, you can. With Web History, you can view and search across the full text of the pages you’ve visited, including Google searches, web pages, images, videos and news stories. You can also manage your web activity and remove items from your web history at any time.”

    Works with Google Toolbar, but there are workarounds
    http://googlesystem.blogspot.c.....thout.html
    W

  61. Sleepy

    I’d prefer to have this info stored on a server in an encrypted manner. Similar to Foxmarks and the only thing needed is to install the plug in and then when you want to search just change the google engine to whatever search engine. This companies or better yet a Firefox branded search engine. This way it’s everywhere you install FF and this plug in.

    Maybe this is where Firefox is going with Weave?

  62. Zotero

    Doesn’t the Firefox plug-in Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/) do this already?

  63. Danielle Morrill

    What I don’t understand is what problem this is solving for the majority of people. I don’t see why I need to “view my collection offline”, because I’m never that cut off from the world, what with wifi being available pretty much everywhere and all.

  64. WebMynd Team

    Thanks for all the comments and feedback. It’s great to hear the good ones, and the bad ones will help us improve.

    In response to a couple of comments about WebMynd slowing down the browser, we have made a small change which will hopefully speed things up on sites with a lot of ads.

    To clarify a few other points:
    - WebMynd stores thumbnails and full images of webpages locally, but also sends the text content up the the server for anonymized indexing. This allows us to offer full-text search now, and in the future it will allow us to offer sharing, cross-browser synchronization and social bookmarking features.
    - Our service is free, but we do not store index data (unless you specifically bookmark a page with the WebMynd star in your toolbar) for more than 7 days. The pay-for upgrade options apply if you want to be able to search your history through WebMynd for longer than that.

    We’ve updated our FAQ to cover these points.

    Many thanks, and happy browsing!

  65. slow down or speed

    I don’t know yet. Does WebMynd have spyware or adware in it?

  66. Rajeev

    Really Cool application, Just like site copiers available in Market.

    http://tekno-world.blogspot.com

  67. Julian

    There was something like Gbrain, which did the same thing via submitting every visited site to google bookmarks where you have a full text search.

  68. T-man

    WebMynd is Spyware by Design… oh well, at least they are open about it.

  69. Zach

    Wow, this article is awesome - but really only because a random perusal of the comments introduced me to Zotero! What a terrific add-on…

  70. one1speed

    I had the good fortune of being a Beta user for the last few weeks. I highly recommend giving this a try and have an open mind. It really changed the way I thought about returning to sites I visited.

  71. Igor

    What about “Un-Social Bookmarking” ;)

  72. Larry Larrikin

    64 WebMynd wrote: WebMynd … also sends the text content up the the server for anonymized indexing.

    Do you waste my upload bandwidth to do this or do your servers hit the sites directly? If the former, do you also send all my web banking, broker etc. pages?

  73. Ben Strackany

    #60: yep, I just read the same thing. http://www.google.com/history

    I tested it out & it does let me search across all the pages I’ve visited. It doesn’t have the graphical thumbnail of the page, but 99% of the time I’m looking for text based information.

  74. ZOMGPWN!

    I was just wondering how much WebMynd paid for this ‘advertorial’?

    Great placement, but it must have cost a pretty penny.

  75. Nat

    Comment of #13, i totally agree with your comment, i’m not going to pay either too.

    Nat
    http://www.workersinc.com

  76. Ryan

    The firefox extension Breadcrumbs already does this for free. And the copy is kept on your hard drive if you are concerned about security. I don’t know how polished it is because I uninstalled it a while ago as the pages were taking up quite a bit of space.

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2954

  77. ettore

    How is this different from BrowseBack, a product available since 2006? (Beside the fact that BrowseBack is Mac only of course.) :-/
    http://smileonmymac.com/browseback

  78. lion

    I don´t like the way they monetize the service. It doesn´t worth it.

  79. EH

    Ctrl-H in Firefox. For everything else, use archive.org or Google cache.

    I mean really, no service similar to this is going to get you evidence-quality historical information, but perhaps I’m not thinking with the mentality that causes those people to print out all the emails they want to read today (you know the ones I’m talking about). Plus, I don’t see any mention of profiles. Where do I upload my avatar on this thing? And where’s my friends list?

  80. Karthick

    Mike,
    There is something wrong with this post. Don’t do this again. We have faith in you…still.

    This is a totally useless stuff. Google gears will do it after coding for couple of minutes. I don’t see anyone using except Mike.

  81. Web Genome

    Sounds like a good idea in theory. in practice has a few issue

    #1 - Do you really want all your browsing recorded and easily searchable? I know it is already done, but this just makes the process more easy to track

    #2 - I have still yet to find the perfect bookmarker. my firefox bookmark toolbar comes the closest. I want to be able to
    1- bookmark and organize with a click
    2- access with a click
    FF bookmarks does a good job
    Diigo has the right idea- unfortunately to sort through your bookmarks it has the same problem as delicous and co…ie.. you have to wait for pages to load.

  82. Ernest

    The free FF Plugin Scrap Book, developed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology is a wonderful piece of software that has been steadily improving over at least the last 2 years.

    It does not automatically record but has a single hot key record feature and lets you organize your collections several ways. You can save a copy of the page or just a selection, annotate it before saving and then do a Full text search later. It backgrounds the download, so you move on. You can print/pdf the entire collection in one go.

    This new mouse trap would have to do much better.

  83. engtech

    seriously questioning the monetization angle like everyone else

    if everything happens on my hardware, where is the incentive to pay?

  84. Praveen

    Great Idea. I still think there is long way to go to make my browsing sessions more useful. tools like basecamp.com are helping people become more productive.

    I think any tool that boosts human productivity and makes collaboration simpler will become killer apps of the future.

    I hope to develop such tools. Ping me at vpsingh88 at yahoo.com to work on such ideas.

    Cheers,
    Praveen.

  85. rkp

    The central idea is sound but the execution seems to be a clone of Thumbstrips (http://innovation.intuit.com/blog/thumbstrips). Kudos to the WM team and YCombinator for opening up the possibility of a new business model. The benefits of storing long term browsing history will become apparent after one has used any browsing recorder application over a period.

  86. grinaldo

    Isn’t this functionality already in the ordinary desktop search programs?

  87. Simon Moore

    Too much info can be inefficient too - disk space - overload - noise!

    Perhaps an index card (of links) is more useful than the whole Library of Congress on my disk drive?

    We have a little web function up and running to good review which works in all browsers

    http://www.anycircle.com does only one thing in simple space efficient way - storage/sharing of bookmarks via a user friendly Ajax interface

    All work in progress of course - feedback celebrated!

    Simon

  88. Hashim Warren

    #43 is right. Google Desktop already records browsing history and allows you to search full text.

    Google desktop also integrates with your regular google searches.

  89. ginger

    this may seem like a good idea but however adeline is way cooler!

  90. Cheesy

    this is an awesome idea but ginger is even cooler! :)))) O Yeah!

  91. ginger

    you are so crazy but i love you by the way i love gage more though so haha i really cant wait till valentines day cause we might get together if you know what i mean lol.

  92. ginger

    awwwwwwwwwwww yeah it is man boy crazy duh duh this is fun and i hate Pellis in othre words penis! lol haha

  93. Cheesy

    So I was wondering If I could ask ginger for some dationg advice??? I’m new at this. hahahahahahahahahahaha! lol ROFL Yeah thats what it feels like everyday with ginger. I laugh till I cry!

  94. ginger

    aww really that is so sweet btw i love you girl but i cant believe that you just left me that is so not right girl ill get you back but i hope you have fun at home cause i miss you and i know mrs allmonds class will be boring and in mrs. holloways class we are going to the library so that will kinda be boring to but you left me so ill have to talk to kyle ….lol eww haha jk kyle man everybody was calling me a goat today and idk why but we are going to leave soon but i dont really care cause im writing you this foreverly long note but i hope you have fun at the house lol i wonder why she just out of the blue came and got you lol! i know why girl haha jk i love you but bell just rang so i got to go cheesy love you forever girl!!!!!:) …………byes

  95. ginger

    kyle is so crazy

  96. cheesy

    OMG! Ginger I just typed you the longest freakin comment ever and i entered a wrong e-mail addres and lost the whole thing. :(((((( I want to cry. It took me forever. I don’t feel like re writing the whole thing so I will try to tell u the stuff tomorrow. I’m Sry! I love you ginger.

  97. ginger

    hey cheesy awww im so srry that you just erased the whole thing that is so sad. but i love you to im writing the stupid reconstruction period thingy civil war thing for mrs. ellis class i so need extra credit:) lol i wonder y? but anyways all i do is copy and past it anyhow!:) oops? am i not supposed to do that? lol but that lady is so adding in grades because there is no way i have that grade haha but i do believe that but omg guess what? TOMORROW IS GEORGIA DAY!!!!!:)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))YEAH!!!! but i dont care haha i do but i didnt bring a hankie. lol hankies remember? but now im writing u a long note but i got to finish typing love ya lots!-Ginger

  98. cheesy

    yeah! I am bout to write that thing. proly just copy and paste it. haha I’m so so so sry bout you and gage! I can’t believe it. Georgia day was fun. haha. I still feel sick from all those donuts! haha and I know I was so sad about the letter I wrote. I finally wrote you back and then stupid me deleted the whole thing! Did you heidi and Krista have fun besides the whole gage thing?? Well I have to ho write this stupid thing. I hope she will take it tomorrow instead of friday. O and I wont be here friday and I’m getting cheaked out thursday. I’m going to Orlando for a baton contest. It will be fun because after this week we have our winter break!! Yay! haha. Well I love ya Ginger. Write back!
    -Cheesy

  99. john

    yo waz up