Wednesday, May 19, 2004

Seruku: Search what you've seen

ResourceShelf discusses a new toolbar application called Seruku. "Seruku is toolbar-based application that ... makes a copy (called a snapshot) of every html web page you've viewed in your browser, stores it locally, indexes the content and then, when needed, allows you to keyword search the full text of this material."

My first thought was that this is silly, basically reimplementing the browser history and cache with a search layered on top. But then I realized that this really could be useful. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to do a Google search that was limited to web pages you have seen before?

It may just be a matter of time before Google puts this functionality in their toolbar, since this is an easy extention to their upcoming search of your hard drive.

Update: John Battelle briefly compares Seruku to Furl.

Update: Microsoft Research's "Stuff I've Seen" project is a generalized version of Seruku.

1 comment:

Greg Linden said...

Great points. You're right that the browser cache is incomplete and unreliable. Reimplementing and extending it does make sense. The toolbar implementation is also clever and convenient.

Another important distinction is that I should have made is that Seruku is a released product. It's out there for people to use.

I may have overstated "Stuff I've Seen" when I said it's a generalized version of Seruku. That seems to be the intent of the project, but who knows what it will look like when it's finished (or if it ever will be).