A new browser plug-in captures what you look at on the Web and stores it in a searchable archive in the cloud.
The plug-in is being developed by a trio of startup artists from Austria, who touted their work last week at a investor’s day in London.
Called Archify, the free plug-in for Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Safari not only indexes pages that appear in your browser, but it also caches them – so when you recall what you’re looking for, it will look exactly as it originally appeared to you.
It can be used from any browser running on any of your devices so you always have access to your archive and the software will integrate what’s in your archive with searches you perform on the Web. Search words typed into a search engine that are indexed in your archive will trigger an overlay. Within the overlay are search results from your archive containing those words.
When you search your archive manually, you can filter your results in a number of ways. You can screen results by media type – by photos, for instance, or videos. You can also filter results by geographic location, by the length of time you viewed a page, or bracket the results within a range of dates.
Archify’s archiving can also be used on services like Facebook and Twitter. You could quickly find a friend’s status update from the past, for example, or a photo they uploaded that’s only a dim memory now.
Integrating your Facebook and Twitter accounts with Archify is an opt-in feature. The development team is also working on making the plug-in play nicely with Google+ and LinkedIn.
To protect its users’ privacy, Archify won’t catalog pages from websites that use https. That can make things problematic for you. For example, both Facebook and Twitter have https options that might interfere with the plug-in. In addition, the software will not gather information from web pages visited in a browser’s private or incognito mode.
Archify is currently in private beta, so you’ll have to sign up for software and wait for an invite before you can use it, but the wait will be worthwhile.
