A new YCombinator startup called WebMynd launched today. It’s a Firefox add-on that records every website you visit and saves a virtual copy on your hard drive.
The service doesn’t save just an image of the page or the URL, but the full text site. That means you can also search those virtual pages later when you are looking for something.
Users can turn off recording at any time, and can delete saved pages that they don’t want to have around for any reason. To see saved pages, you click on an icon at the top of the browser and the local saved copies pop up, along with a search bar.
The idea is that, like Gmail, good search means you don’t have to spend a lot of time bookmarking and tagging websites to find them later. WebMynd records everything in the background, and a quick search will locate the page.
One thing I’d love to see added is a text box somewhere on the browser where you can type in tags to describe any page you are on, and to have that data saved along with the virtual page. The result could make searching easier down the road.
The basic add-on is free and keeps pages for a week. Users pay $10 for six months of history or $20 for a full year. After testing this I can tell it’s a service I’ll continue to use to quickly find sites I visited. Simple service, basic business model, and useful. Classic YCombinator stuff.