Personal Reverse Index of the Web.
Sep. 16th, 2004 04:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swestrupI went and upgraded to Firefox 1.0PR today. It looked like the only way to deal with some glitches in V9.3 that were bugging me. The glitches are gone alright, but so are something like 50% of the extensions that I use. It looks like the extension interface has changed (again) and most folks haven't gotten around to updating their code yet.
So far though, all of the extensions that I MUST have, seem to be available, including Deepest Sender and Tabbrowser Preferences (which is, for some reason, not on the official extensions site, despite being cruicial to happy use of tabs).
So, looking through the extensions that are (and are not) currently available, I noticed one that had caught my eye before. Its called Slogger and it can be configured to keep a permanent copy of every single webpage you ever visit. As storage gets cheaper, this starts to have more and more appeal, and if my current system wasn't already packed to the gunn'ls with files, I would install this.
When I'm doing research into a new subject, like I was so recently going with aviation, I often don't know how relevant a webpage is to my research until I've seen enough other pages to understand the first ones content. Thus, I often find myself scrambling to re-locate a page I remember a few random phrases from, but no more. If those phrases are common, or I've misremembered, it can be a very frustrating search, indeed. With something like Slogger, I could run a text search over the download cache, and if worse came to worse I could reread all of the pages I'd been to that week, in reverse order.
This has the potential to be quite useful as is, but I think I want something more. Why should I have to run a text search engine over the pages in the cache? Why couldn't it build a complete reverse index of the page contents as it stored them? That way, one could do a search for all of the pages containing a phrase or word, and get an almost instant response. Plus, if you're low on disk space like I am, you could have it just store the index. Almost as good for the kind of research that I do.
I may just suggest that to the Slogger author, now that I think about it.
So far though, all of the extensions that I MUST have, seem to be available, including Deepest Sender and Tabbrowser Preferences (which is, for some reason, not on the official extensions site, despite being cruicial to happy use of tabs).
So, looking through the extensions that are (and are not) currently available, I noticed one that had caught my eye before. Its called Slogger and it can be configured to keep a permanent copy of every single webpage you ever visit. As storage gets cheaper, this starts to have more and more appeal, and if my current system wasn't already packed to the gunn'ls with files, I would install this.
When I'm doing research into a new subject, like I was so recently going with aviation, I often don't know how relevant a webpage is to my research until I've seen enough other pages to understand the first ones content. Thus, I often find myself scrambling to re-locate a page I remember a few random phrases from, but no more. If those phrases are common, or I've misremembered, it can be a very frustrating search, indeed. With something like Slogger, I could run a text search over the download cache, and if worse came to worse I could reread all of the pages I'd been to that week, in reverse order.
This has the potential to be quite useful as is, but I think I want something more. Why should I have to run a text search engine over the pages in the cache? Why couldn't it build a complete reverse index of the page contents as it stored them? That way, one could do a search for all of the pages containing a phrase or word, and get an almost instant response. Plus, if you're low on disk space like I am, you could have it just store the index. Almost as good for the kind of research that I do.
I may just suggest that to the Slogger author, now that I think about it.
