Daisy is "an archiving proxy server," which, I admit, sounds like the most unexciting thing in the world until you figure out what it really does. Daisy is a plugin for Firefox that takes every web site you visit and stores a copy of it locally, so even if you don't have an Internet connection or if your History gets purged, you still have complete access to that great article you found two weeks ago. What's more, every web page you view Daisy indexes for full-text searching, so, unlike the History, even if you don't remember anything about the page's title or URL, you can still find it by searching for keywords.
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4
Subscribe to commentsSanjay GoelNov 10th 2005 4:51AM
doesn't google desktop provide the same functionality of archiving web history + lot lot more ?? and you can't compete with google when it comes to full text searching
Max VenusNov 10th 2005 5:26AM
This must quickly eat up lots of disk space, especially on sites with lots of ads and images.
I'll stick to using a program called Surfulater (http://www.surfulater.com) which lets me save whatever I want from the Web, organize it, add notes and links, edit content, search and lots more. A great little program.
Kevin A. SmithNov 10th 2005 11:26AM
Hi -
I'm the author of Daisy and I'd like to address a couple of points about Daisy:
1) Daisy is specifically targeted at web surfing and web content. It doesn't do full PC indexing. If that's a feature you need, then please consider one of the desktop search products out there.
2) Daisy compresses all content stored on your disk. This drastically reduces the amount of space needed. There are also options in the control panel to tweak how long content is retained and also how much disk space is used.
Daisy's strength lies in its ability to recreate a page as it existed at a given point in time. Daisy will even let you export that snapshot as a zip file suitable for standalone viewing so you can send the snapshot to others.
Keep in mind too that Daisy is a work-in-progress. The current UI doesn't expose the full featureset. Features coming soon are:
* Full PDF and RSS/Atom feed indexing and snapshotting. If you can point you're aggregator at Daisy as its proxy server Daisy can index and snapshot your "blogstream". This feature will be in the next release (Beta 3) which should be out by this weekend.
* Querying on other attributes besides text including host name, links, etc.
* An external scripting API callable from any language which can send HTTP requests and process XML.
I'm very committed to making Daisy the best product possible. Please feel free to email me (kevin@electricanvil.com) with your comments about Daisy. Of course, all flames will be sent to the bitbucket.
Kevin A. SmithNov 13th 2005 6:27PM
Daisy Beta 3 was released today, 11/13/2005. This release fixes many bugs reported in Beta 2 and adds searching support for PDF, RSS, and Atom documents.