I suspect that the reason people keeps tabs open is a deficiency of all modern browsers -- if we had the ability to search the contents of our history of sites, it would dramatically reduce our need to desperately hold onto tabs.
Right now you can search the history, but it searches only the title and basic metadata, and as we know well from HN, titles are often wholly unrelated with the content.
So many times I've found a page that has interesting information, and I can easily remember snippets of the page, but without walking through my history manually for hours, I'm left with trying to remember unique phrases and instead searching the world of information on Google, having to winnow through a lot of chaff. It would be so great if a browser (or an evil cloud-synced variant) generated a search corpus of every page you visit -- understanding the overhead and costs, made viable by many cores and massive IO performance -- allowing you to say "I saw a site about banking regulation and overcommitments in the past week...where was it?"
Assemble a team or otherwise generate enough interest in making Permafrost[1] a reality, and you could have this. I'd love to work on this with somebody...
Right now you can search the history, but it searches only the title and basic metadata, and as we know well from HN, titles are often wholly unrelated with the content.
So many times I've found a page that has interesting information, and I can easily remember snippets of the page, but without walking through my history manually for hours, I'm left with trying to remember unique phrases and instead searching the world of information on Google, having to winnow through a lot of chaff. It would be so great if a browser (or an evil cloud-synced variant) generated a search corpus of every page you visit -- understanding the overhead and costs, made viable by many cores and massive IO performance -- allowing you to say "I saw a site about banking regulation and overcommitments in the past week...where was it?"