[HN Gopher] Show HN: Eesel - Federated search without API integr...
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Show HN: Eesel - Federated search without API integrations
Hey there! Amogh here from eesel (https://eesel.app). eesel filters
your browser history to show the docs you need for work, right in
your new tab. You can see recent docs, filter by app or search by
title or content. We're trying to solve a pretty universal
problem. Everyone's work is spread across apps - there's a project
brief in Google Docs, issues in Jira, a mockup in Figma, PRs in
GitHub - and with this kind of sprawl, it can be a game of trial
and error to find the links we need to do our job. Trying keywords
in the address bar only works if we remember the title and it's
specific enough, search in apps can be slow and noisy, company
"knowledge hubs" in Confluence or Google Drive are usually not up
to date, and we ultimately just ping each other on Slack to find
things. I was struggling with this acutely as a PM at Intercom,
and it felt ridiculous that I could search the web faster than my
company's docs. It was around this time that I also discovered an
Effective Altruism blog post on Operations
(https://80000hours.org/articles/operations-management/) and how
"maximising the productivity of others in the organisation" can
have this multiplier effect for your own impact. That's when it
clicked - here's an "operations" problem that felt tractable for my
skills and I could potentially multiply my impact by solving it.
This is what gave the conviction to prototype something on the
weekends, and things spun off from there. Let's talk about the
solution more. The magical thing about eesel is that we don't use
APIs. When it comes to "search across apps", integrating with
different APIs is a pretty default way to approach things. That's
how we started, but things felt uneasy - could we really build API
integrations with _everything_? There's so much out there, and this
list is pretty much always changing. If we really did want a
search across all work apps, we'd have to play catch up with old
and new APIs. You could argue that these were just the schleps
(http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html) we had to overcome, but it
was amidst this we realised that uh, the browser exists. We mostly
work in the browser, and the great thing about it is that it's
built on web standards. From HTTP and URLs to HTML and CSS, all
apps in the browser follow the same predictable patterns: documents
are accessed via URLs, content lives inside the HTML, there's a
page title, there's a favicon, and so on. It's not a perfect
replacement for APIs, but it felt good enough. We didn't need to
manually integrate with each app, and could instead rely on
existing web standards. And that's what we did. eesel works with
any app in the browser, including apps without APIs (like that
internal company tool), or apps that don't exist yet (the new
Product Hunt hit). Not using APIs also meant that we could go an
extra step with privacy - eesel works fully locally by default and
you don't need to login to _anything_ (even eesel!). Simply install
and it works. We want to keep building on this approach and
improve how we work in the browser. For instance, eesel uses
keywords to automatically organise pages into Folders, and there's
Commands to take actions (spoiler: you can customise a JavaScript
to inject on a page, like this script that goes to a Notion backlog
and clicks the "New" button - https://eesel.notion.site/Notion-New-
page-f10c7398209544088a...). Alright, that's a lot of writing from
us. We have a bunch of ideas, and would love to hear about where
you think we should take this next.
Author : amoghs
Score : 16 points
Date : 2022-07-15 12:14 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eesel.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eesel.app)
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| nice. i tried it on firefox. it did not show me tabs that were in
| the private windows, only ones in the "non-private browsing" one
| which kinda isnt for me as i do most of my work in the private
| browsing windows during the day. Maybe you can add support for
| that
| metadat wrote:
| You might be able to use Firefox containers and set FF to
| forget all history when you exit?
|
| I prefer my private browsing not be remembered by any apps, it
| generally wouldn't be useful.
| clon wrote:
| Caught my attention as eesel means donkey in my mother tongue.
| Privacy policy and terms of service links lead nowhere. Does not
| seem like those topics are considered seriously, just to make the
| footer look right. Seems like a scam.
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(page generated 2022-07-15 23:01 UTC)