Webephant

Webephant is a proof-of-concept prototype for a context-based Web page recall feature. It remembers term vectors of each Web page you visit and when you visited it, and allows you to answer questions such as "What was that page about 'Linux DNS' that I saw last week?"

One thing I found while using the prototype is that I almost never took the time to specify the when part of the query — it somehow seemed easier to me, as a user, to type only the search keywords and then manually go through the matches. This suggests that the biggest benefit of a Webephant-like feature might be the ability to keyword-search on things you've seen before, and that the when temporal constraint might be most useful as an optional query refinement step.

I hacked up a working prototype of Webephant over the holiday in Dec-1997, and demonstrated it to some people at that time, but didn't get around to putting up this Web page until Mar-2001. I'm not aware of any Web browsers that yet offer a similar feature.