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by throw_away 1628 days ago
It would be cool if I could take my existing browser history, aggregate by domain, sort by frequency & then create the necessary xml for the programmable search. Maybe with a pick & choose UI so I could decide which sites I wanted.

Right now, looking at your allow-list config, it feels a bit custom to you, but if I had an easy way to limit search to the sites I myself know and trust, I could see how that would be useful.

I know I could probably pick it out of my browser's history UI & poke it into Google's Programmable Search UI, but that seems like a hassle and a half.

2 comments

That's a good idea! Not OP, but I'm creating a faster search engine for programming queries, depending on the tech searched it will also point to curated sites that could have the answer. Will try to implement your idea as well. Thanks!
Good idea! Would you pay for a premium version where you can customize the whitelist (and additional features) if it were available? Bing charges around $5 per 1000 searches, so I guess it would cost about the same. (Google's API is limited to 10K searches / day, even when paid)
I think just the history->xml conversion would be a bit of a hard sell, but I would be willing to pay for a sub if there were some additional features like:

* easy add to my filter list (like maybe a browser plugin so I can see that the current site isn't in my filter, but I can click a button and now it's in my filter & opposite for remove for when sites start to suck)

* stats on which sites I visit after searching

* aggregate bing+google filtered searches

* curated site lists for different topics, top 100, etc. Maybe like a temporary search using these sets such that I can try them without affecting my own filters. Maybe sharing lists w friends

* some sort of search anonymization/log deletion feature

* integration with browser search on desktop & mobile

* search flags like duckduckgo so I can easily switch filter sets by typing like /news or /nerdshit in the query

* integration with archive.ph & wayback machine