Fetching.io turns your browsing history into a searchable database

Some apps make it easy to delete your browsing history for the sake of privacy and security. This one called Fetching, however, does the opposite: it saves a comprehensive copy of your history for years to come. What for? Well, searching random words on Google doesn’t always return the results you want, and a browser’s native history could be a useless jungle of websites. You can use this app to search only among websites you’ve browsed in the past and find that particularly interesting feature you’ve read or that great deal you’ve come across. 

When his friend Kelly mentioned she was interviewing for a new job, Peter Brown told her there was an article she needed to read. He couldn’t remember where he’d seen it. And he couldn’t remember what company it was about. But he knew she had to read it. And, luckily, he had invented an app that could find it. Built for desktop and laptop machines, the app is called Fetching.io. It caches every single webpage you visit, creating your own personal search engine where you can search solely what you’ve seen in the past. Brown came up with the idea after trying—and failing—to find something else that did this. “I got sick and tired of losing websites I’d seen before—or spending a frustratingly long time re-finding them,” he says. You know how it is. You visit so many different sites and use so many different apps that it’s hard to remember where you’ve read what. You can try Googling for particular phrases you might remember from an article, but that’s not always enough to find what you’re looking for.