Infoaxe is coming out of stealth mode today with (yet another) alternative search engine / social bookmarking tool, focused on indexing your own browsing history rather than the entire web or what you proactively indicate is important to remember for later.
Installing the infoaxe toolbar (works with IE and Firefox) basically enables users to ‘record’ public web browsing sessions with just one mouse click, after which they can search through their personal history from the toolbar itself or the infoaxe website. Also, the tool generates additional search results based on your ‘web memory’ alongside what you find on the web using traditional search engines (see demo video below to see it in action), and renders your delicious bookmarks searchable by sucking them into the indexed data.
Next to the twist on search, infoaxe also allows you to tag and share web pages, essentially competing directly against delicious, ma.gnolia and other social bookmarking services. In the future, the company also aims to serve as a discovery engine by offering personalized recommendations based on your web history.
Quite frankly, I don’t think anyone is really waiting for something like infoaxe. Personally, I find much more value in searching my delicious bookmarks because they contain all the web pages I felt were actually worth bookmarking instead of every random website I’ve ever visited. That said, infoaxe does have one cool feature dubbed ‘Pivot‘ that lets you search your web history based on a certain timeframe. E.g. when I’ve been researching a company and its competitors for a TechCrunch review in the past, Pivot would enable me to get an overview of all the pages I visited during the time I conducted the research.
Infoaxe, currently in alpha stage, was developed by Jonathan Siddharth and Vijay Krishnan when they were still grad students at Stanford. The company raised initial seed funding of $900,000 in March 2008 from Labrador Ventures, DFJ (Tim Draper), Band of Angels and Amidzad Ventures.
WebMynd has a similar approach for visualizing your web history, but is a bit more limited as it only works on Firefox, doesn’t have the same social sharing features and is not as portable as Infoaxe is because they don’t require their users to register.
Infoaxe – Never forget a Page Again! (Quick Demo) from Infoaxe on Vimeo.
Thea last thing I want is my browsing history being saved where someone could search for anything. Big Brother?
Hey Darth i think infoaxe does have some feature which allows you to delete the browsing history or webpages which you dont want it to remember..also you can always stop recording incase u dnt want infoaxe to store it
also you can always stop recording incase u dnt want infoaxe to store it
Good one Beavis.
I have personally used infoaxe and i think its an extremely useful tool….I have in fact stopped bookmarking in my computer ever since i started using infoaxe..i use pivoting quite a lot ..it helps be to get back to the context to which i was originally working.. I think infoaxe has adopted the minimalistic mantra as google ..it makes the interface look simple and easy to use..
Oh, perhaps employers are waiting for this – isn’t that what the name means?
We’ve got INFO on your browsing, so now you’re AXEd.
That sounds exactly like what Filangy.com was trying to do back in 2005. Did not work well, at least for them.
The toolbar is super-useful. Saves me a lot of time in my everyday searches.
Infoaxe is actually pretty cool! Searching for your browsing history is so much faster than trying to recollect what page you had visited 10 days, or searching for it again on a search engine. Particularly when you were looking for some specific information that took you a while to reach.
And lets not forget that you can always turn the recording off when you want to browse without your history being collected. And firefox bookmarks cannot be used from other comps/laptops. As a person who uses a bunch of machines, I love infoaxe to quickly pull up something for me.
Its pretty cool. I use Info Axe and it makes going back to a web page you really liked so much easier. Especially when your target page is not in the first page of Google.
And the fact that you can tag and share the pages also makes it a really cool add on to the browser!
Wow, for a service that was in stealth mode they sure seem to have a lot of (coincidentally anonymous) users that are really really excited about the service …
Who said they were in stealth mode. They had released alpha version quite a while back.
http://www.timelope.com did it better…in theory.
Hi Robin,
It appears that we haven’t communicated our stealth mode timelines to you with enough clarity. We were in stealth mode testing with a private group of about 100 friends till early Oct. Since then our service has been open to the public, though this is our first coverage in a popular silicon valley blog since then. During this period we have added over 2000 registered users, and a good fraction of them are daily actives.
The idea of Infoaxe would seem novel and interesting to most people. But these guys have backed it up with one hell of a great implementation. I love Infoaxe and although I don’t switch computers too frequently, I find it useful because your browser history cannot search for keywords IN THE WEBPAGE, only in the title or the link. Most useful and recommended!
Infoaxe is really good when it comes to sharing your web pages. Its so easy to do. their plug-ins are so useful for me to gets things done quickly.
infoaxe rocks !!!
Infoaxe seems like a nice idea. I have recently started using it and find it quite useful. It’s the best way to get hold of a webpage that you had visited earlier, from which a couple of keywords you remember well, but a google search is unlikely to get it for you soon.
Cheers,
Sudeep
Pivot is absolutely useful for someone like me who doesn’t like to spend time or effort tagging, but finds the need very often to go back in time and search for something i’ve looked at in the past. For example, I was researching for a vacation and found this really nice travel site that I didn’t bother book marking. Now all I have to remember is the time frame I did my search. I can see a non-trivial number of folks who don’t proactively bookmark or forsee future need for something they searched in the past. You guys should seriously market this toward researchers as well!
Why hasn’t anyone done this earlier? Seems like a no brainer really. This is a seriously untapped market.
What’s the bet Google will jump on this bandwagon in the next couple of years by expanding their search history efforts.
Oh Did i miss to say that I have been actively using Infoaxe Alpha for a month.
Google already has this feature and more with their chrome browser.
But not clear which will get more popular, google chrome or infoaxe.
I think pivot is a really cool feature. Including timing information with browsing history and making it searchable thus really saves a lot of time and effort when I have to go back and look up websites I visited before. I am not an active bookmarker and prefer my search to lead me to my websites and I think having my search history recorded (when I WANT) and available to me, is going to be really helpful.
Maybe because I never got hooked to delicious, and never got into the habit of anticipating and booking what I’d need later, I have often found myself trying to recreate a browsing session to lookup something I had seen online. This seems like what I need, especially with the pivot feature.
Well I think this is a good implementation of a very compelling idea. I could definitely see the benefit personally of such a tool. However, i do see that Google Chrome has an exact same feature. And the fact that it does it locally instead of sending it out to a remote machine is kinda more compelling. But i guess, how many people would even care local vs remote?
I co-founded a company in 1999 that did this. At last users were more interested in a simple bookmarking features than the more interesting personal search concepts.
Tim – Backflip.com
They should merge with Jigsaw.
I have been using Infoaxe for some weeks now. I find it very useful especially because u dont have to bother about book marking pages.
I liked the infoaxe for its utility over different platforms. I end up working on different computers in my workplace, home, and other places — not public computers, but just many different machines. It often happens that what you searched on one computer is needed some other day while you are not necessarily at the same machine (and of course you do not remember where and when you searched it). It is incredibly useful in such a situation.
Apart from that, another feature I found useful was the pivot. Actually it is incredibly useful in searching for the same research papers, technical articles, news articles on the same issue that you visited. It is a simple but a very useful tool.
I’m curious how a company like this raises $900,000 before they have any users. I haven’t tried their service at all, but I just don’t see why the idea alone, or an early prototype, gets almost a million in funding before any marketplace interest is shown.
Did these guys have a prior successful record? Or is money really that easy to come by in the Valley?
It is a useful tool! Great job guys!
Agree with Artem. Filangy tried and failed with this concept
http://web.arch...sp?inc=more.jsp
Good luck to InfoAxe but I think manging user perception on privacy will be an uphill battle
InfoAxe is awesome guys!!!
InfoAxe rocks… I found this tool pretty useful to revisit a series of pages from my history across multiple systems… I especially like the pivot feature which helps to recreate browsing session from my past very easily…
“they sure seem to have a lot of (coincidentally anonymous) users”
@Robin Wauters : The founders have a sufficiently large social network, and have been good with publicizing the app. I’ve known about them for a while and it seems like a good demo.
“I’m curious how a company like this raises $900,000 before they have any users.”
@josh : Take a look at the founders’ credentials.
I just checked them out at Crunchbase; Jonathan Siddharth seems to have a strong academic background and is no doubt a smart guy, but that doesn’t particularly stand out as a reason that makes them funding-worthy. Did I miss something?
A simple albeit powerful concept indeed!. Other comparable firefox plugins or open source versions have their limitations in search. To those who argue about the choice of search versus explicit bookmarking to navigate your own web history, here is a relatively simple question: Do you believe that the latter scales, given the deluge of information you plough through daily?
To those who argue about not wanting everything they visit being implicitly bookmarked here is a something to ponder: Why do you think “ranking” query results was invented?
Its amazing how quickly people post uninformed criticisms! Encouraging innovation is very important.
Peave, love, Empathy.
Infoaxe is an amazing creation for users (like me) who very often, bookmark their favorite web pages. Being an active infoaxe user, I have no more worries to keep track of my web searches. I really recommend people to give it a shot to experience its true wonder!!
I have used this tool for a good few weeks now, and got the link through a friend.
I usually end up doing some research for work at home, and find that I don’t remember the exact links when I am at work. I like the way I can use it to transfer my search history from home to work.
I do have some privacy concerns, however, though I believe they catalog just non-HTTPS pages.
The implementation is pretty slick and the speed is pretty nice, and I like the GUI and user interaction stuff.
I really don’t buy most of the reviews posted. Why are people trying to hard-sell this utility? I think such reviews only dissuade users such as me from even experimenting with this utility. It appears as though most of the people have some vested interests in it.
I can’t help but say that the video demonstration of infoaxe was pathetic. Surely there must be a way to avoid all those extraneous sounds.
@chaturnar: couldnt agree with you more. the comments here, seem shady at best. everyone seems to love this utility but, really, what is so novel? do you really want to store your history on their servers? and do you really want to install yet another tool bar? what if they go belly up, then you’ll sorely miss not storing your bookmarks. either way, they should come up with a way, to “Export my browsing history”, so it can be imported into delicious. 6 of the anonymous posters seem to love the “pivot” feature. really? seems awefully shady. anyway, google’s “Web History” has excellent analytics and for now, it seems to satisfy my needs.
@gunarhhh: yeah, i don’t get how they got this far along without realizing what they’ve created already exists. as you mentioned, google’s web history does this (http://www.google.com/history). if you don’t want the history stored on google’s servers, use google desktop instead (http://desktop.google.com). and yes, both products have a timeline view. with regards to the noise on the video, they should invest in a quality usb headset mic.
I have just started using infoaxe, and it is pretty useful for someone like me who spends most of the time digging for stuff in the internet..
I actually dont agree with one of robin’s view that current bookmarks are sufficient enough and utilities provided by infoaxe is not something that might be extremely useful…
I spend a lot of time searching for some sports streaming websites, and i have found infoaxe to be useful in revisiting some of the already visited streaming websites.. Eventhough i bookmark the link that worked last time, it neccessarily does not work the next day… Invariably i have to search again to find an alternate link..
Thats where infoaxe comes into play, because its insane to bookmark every damn link that you visit when you search for something..
@Prak: I don’t understand how infoaxe can solve your problem (it should have the same link as you had visited kept in its memory right??).
@Tim: Search today was not the same as search in 1999. It is now that people are extremely comfortable with searching as a way to find content on the internet. Who would have thought in 1999 that searching for mails is a good way to find your old mails (still painfully slow on an outlook client but ever so useful on gmail). So maybe you were too early to market.
I don’t find infoaxe too useful for my style of internet usage since most of my information comes to me via Google reader. Also, if I want to search my history, I don’t want to think about which part of it I can search and which part I can’t (did I log in or not?). For instance, I remember visiting a page with some details on a start up company and I couldn’t find it again via infoaxe after trying various keyword combinations I had seen on the site. I can’t google for it because the keywords are pretty lame for googling the entire universe of sites but i don’t seem to find it on infoaxe because perhaps I had seen the details on some site where it required me to sign in.
@arjun: I dont see as to why infoaxe wudnt help.. It keeps all the links that i had visited when searching for a sports streaming link… the problem is that not all links work all the time.. So it really help to have a personal web memory of all the links, which happens to be the more relevant content to me as supposed to the entire web..
A very simple query in infoaxe like “cricket” returns all the websites i had visited when i was looking for a streaming website for a cricket match..
I’ve been using Infoaxe for a while now, and it comes really handy at some times. Actually, I find bookmarking a pain, so Infoaxe helps me not worry about missing a page after I visited it once.
Great job guys!
This is real very useful to access our browsing history which remove head ache of bookmarking every site,If there is addition to this like we cna remove our info whenever we want and also omitting some info not to be added Infoaxe.
clean interface. simple and useful tool.
I didn’t know how well this would work, at first. But this is pretty freakin good
. Keep up the good work bro, or as we said it before the last time we met “keeping it real yo” 
what you said in the beginning of the fourth paragraph, “I don’t think anyone is really waiting for something like infoaxe,” is exactly what i was thinking after i read the first 2 lines.
the tools we have already work; let’s focus on making them better.
I would like to start by saying that one of the founders of the company “Siddharth Jonathan” is a friend of mine.. although i highly doubt if he would remember me now
We were in the same high school, college etc…
Straight to the point – w.r.t Infoaxe.
We are without doubt in an era of research where every area looks saturated… I personally felt this during my master’s research in the area of fingerprinting. Having said that – its safe to assume that the co-incidental probability that two ideas that are pretty much similar coming out at the same time is acceptable to be nearing to 1. Yes – am talking about Webmynd. Am also guessing that Chrome would have it as an inbuild feature…Anyways – the only embraceable difference my trivial mind with little knowledge can see between the two is the “pivot” feature. And the concept of portability as well. From the short list of users who have commented above [which to some degree can be extrapolated to visualize a potential market for this tool in the upcoming future] – i see that roughly 50% find the features to be useful and the other 50% find it either not so useful or not worthy enough to take the time to actually use it [these people rather prefer bookmarking or doing nothing]. I fall in the latter category. The stuff that concerns me are this – 1. why cant i find something in this tool that no other tool has [like a USP, if you will], 2. Is it really that useful or just another pain like those zillions of plugins that i install on a 5 per day basis and never even bother to use it from the next day? and so forth…………
If i was a researcher in the search area – and assuming this idea brushed through my mind – i feel i somehow would have not pursued with this idea hoping its not big enough – hey, but thats me.
Again – i sincerely hope that the tool makes it big and i wish the very best for the founders. I intentionally tried very hard to be non-sarcastic or cynical…. My apologies if there was a hint of either…….
I wanted to provide a blatantly honest review from my standpoint – and I hope the founders are craving for a lot more of these…. Rather than patronizing a concept for the sake of it.
Again – wishing you the best.
Abi –
Later!
infoaxe doesnt work properly…just tested both webmynd and infoaxe… it takes forever to index the webpages…it never shows up..its not https..its normal webpage…infoaxe says” no result did not match any pages in your Web Memory.
[PAGES TYPICALLY TAKE 2 MINUTES FROM THE TIME YOU VISIT IT TO SHOW UP IN YOUR WEB MEMORY.] ” .even after 20 MINUTES!!..still nothin…meanwhile in webmynd i could get the result immediately…and also the tumbnail…very easy..
DO NOT TOUCH WITH A BARGE POLE.
ASKING YOU TO REPLY IN 3 MINUTES is the CREEPIEST THING for any company to do and is designed to soften you up to give oyur aol pass word. Not even aolask for oyur pass word. This is pure poison.
Infoaxe > Google.
This is a good idea, I have always wanted something like this, but not all pages that I visit should be indexed, if I bookmark the page then it should be indexed and full text made available as a corpus for seareching.