What exactly is infoaxe?

infoaxe is your Personal Web Memory. You never have to remember a web page by bookmarking, emailing to yourself etc. We believe that a Web user has more important things to do while on the Web than to do these other tasks which are basically, distractions.

With infoaxe, whatever you ’see’ on the Web, becomes instantly searchable for you. You carve out your space on the Web by the sites you visit and infoaxe lets you search, manage and take this with you wherever you go. You will never forget a Web page again. Ever.

Why do I need infoaxe? Here are some sample scenarios where infoaxe comes in handy.

John had found a review about the IPhone a few months back that he really liked. He wants to share that review with his friend Jill but he can’t seem to find it again amidst the deluge of IPhone reviews on Google. Since with infoaxe, you now have your Personal Web Memory, John can find the IPhone review that he liked, very easily by searching his Web Memory with infoaxe.

Mary is hunting for apartments in Palo Alto. She has looked at many apartments on craigslist and rent.com. She is finding it impossible to keep track of the ones she liked. Bookmarking seems like a lot of work for so many pages and an overkill since she is sure that after this week she wouldn’t really be looking at these apartments again.

Mary does not have to bookmark anything. If she wanted to revisit all the apartments she looked at on University Avenue, she could just search infoaxe with the query ‘university avenue’.

You will also notice that with infoaxe, you can afford to be lazier than with Google. For eg. if you wanted to revisit your friend John’s blog but can’t remember the url. Finding it with google would most likely involve a fairly long query to wade through all the other Johns on the Web. With infoaxe, you can afford to just type in “John blog” and you are very likely to see it right at the top. (assuming of course that you have seen in it at least once before)

What is Pivot?

Here is a another slightly less obvious use case. Say, you wanted to look at all the websites you looked at when you were researching grad schools. This sounds almost impossible to accomplish with a general Web Search Engine like Google. The right query is quite hard in this case since there likely isn’t one single query which will give you all the pages. You might have looked at other grad schools like MIT, CMU etc, tips for writing good grad school essays etc. infoaxe helps you here by letting you pivot around a Web page in your Web Memory. Think of this as something like time travel. You can ask infoaxe to show you all the web pages you were looking at when you were looking at the Stanford University Graduate Admissions home page. We think its more natural to remember events than dates, and pivot lets you pivot around events in your Web Memory.

How can I delete stuff from my Web Memory?

If you see something in your web memory that you want to delete, click on the delete link that appears next to the search result snippet. You have the option of deleting just that page or all pages from that site. It will take about 2 minutes for the changes to take effect i.e. for it to stop showing up in your search results. Source: infoaxe faq

The creators of infoaxe add: Vijay Krishnan and I have been working on Infoaxe for a while now and we are happy to be releasing an alpha version of our search engine to the public.

Infoaxe is a Personal Browsing History Search Engine. With Infoaxe every page that you visit on the Internet gets added to a collection called your Personal Web Memory and infoaxe makes this collection, searchable across all the computers you use. Thanks to Infoaxe, there is no need to ever bookmark a page again. It makes getting back to web pages seen in the past (like videos, news articles etc) extremely fast and easy. Infoaxe also lets you ‘pivot’ around web pages seen in the past to see other pages that you visited at the same time. Tagging and sharing pages from your web memory with your friends is also very convenient with Infoaxe.

We have been receiving rave reviews from our existing users and hope you find Infoaxe compelling as well and join the growing number of happy Infoaxe users!

Why Infoaxe?
The Infoaxe story began when Vijay and I were graduate students in Computer Science at Stanford, as a result of the increasing problem we faced, of being able to keep track of interesting and useful information on the Web. The Web is growing rapidly and it is rapidly outgrowing the tools we are using to keep track of the Web (bookmarks, emailing links to yourself etc). Infoaxe is the next big step in this regard. We wanted to make it extremely easy for web users to keep track of their personal slice of the Web.

What is Infoaxe?
Infoaxe is a search engine for your web memory.
Every page that you see on the Web gets added to your personal Web Memory and is now searchable.
Your Web memory is private to you and portable (can be accessed across any computer that you use).
You never have to bookmark a page again! (everything gets implicitly bookmarked and becomes searchable)

What should I do to get started?
V. Simple. Sign up for Infoaxe and install the infoaxe toolbar. The toolbar sends the urls to be added to
your personal web memory so its necessary to install the toolbar on all computers you use.

Go to http://www.infoaxe.com and watch the quick demo video. Check out the FAQ as well, which should answer most of your questions.

Here are some cool things you can do with your Web Memory at your finger tips,

* Your web history synchronized, searchable and portable across all computers and browsers you use. Take it wherever you go!

* Pivot on events: Say, you wanted to look at all the websites you looked at when you were researching grad schools many months ago. This sounds almost impossible to accomplish with a general Web Search Engine like Google. The right query is quite hard in this case since there likely isn’t one single query which will give you all the pages. You might have looked at other grad schools like MIT, CMU etc, tips for writing good grad school essays etc. infoaxe helps you here by letting you pivot around a Web page in your Web Memory. Think of this as something like time travel. You can ask infoaxe to show you all the web pages you were looking at when you were looking at the Stanford University Graduate Admissions home page. We think its more natural to remember events than dates, and pivot lets you pivot around events in your Web Memory.

* Many of our users tell us that thanks to infoaxe, their search queries to Google have become a lot shorter. For eg. these days to go to the website of the restaurant Siam Royal in Palo Alto, I no longer need to type ” siam royal palo alto” to Google. I just type “siam royal”.(That’s a lie, I actually just type “siam” )With of our convenient Google widget, searching on Google.com displays infoaxe web memory results on the vacant right column of the Google search results page.

* Here is another example, Mary is hunting for apartments in Palo Alto. She has looked at many apartments on craigslist and rent.com. She is finding it impossible to keep track of the ones she liked. Bookmarking seems like a lot of work for so many pages and an overkill since she is sure that after this week she wouldn’t really be looking at these apartments again. Mary does not have to bookmark anything. If she wanted to revisit all the apartments she looked at on University Avenue, she could just search infoaxe with the query ‘university avenue’.

* Tagging - add labels to saved web pages to help organize them better.

Infoaxe is still very young and we have many more exciting features in the offing that we will be releasing over the next couple of months. So sign up, download the infoaxe toolbar and we hope you find it useful!

If you like Infoaxe, do tell your friends about it! You can also become a fan of Infoaxe on facebook (search for infoaxe on facebook and join the growing infoaxe community).

The Big Picture: The Infoaxe Vision
In a user’s Web Memory there is enormous knowledge and experience, very similar to what you would find with an avid book reader. Infoaxe connects a user with her Web Memory so that she can better reuse and tap into her Web experience. Think of it as your very own Bookcase for the Web where you have access to a copy of every page that you ever saw on the Web.

We also believe that if we connect you to your Web Memory and allow you to derive value from it, there is also an interesting side effect which is that your friends benefit!

Here is an example:
Ann: Hey do you think I should get the iPhone or the Google Phone?
Mark: Hmmm…tough call..but hey I remember this great review that I read a while back which compared the two and gave some great insights..
Ann: Do you think you can dig up that review again?
Mark: No prob…I use Infoaxe!! I can refind it
in no time from my Web Memory.