This sounds an awful lot like Microsoft's Recall, only implemented in the browser.

Granted, there have been a lot of times I have trouble finding a website in my history, open tabs or even bookmarks, so I could potentially see how that might be advantageous as long as I was in a situation where I had a second browser for "non-work" related tasks, or this was strictly prohibited in in-private mode.

>4. Find webpages you previously visited

>For those frustrating instances when you want to jump back into a past project but don’t want to scroll through your history to find an important website you previously visited, soon you’ll be able to use Gemini in Chrome to recall it for you. Once launched, you can try prompts like “what was the website that I saw the walnut desk on last week?” or “what was that blog I read on back to school shopping?”

As for their "agentic browsing assistant", I don't have much trouble adding stuff to my shopping cart or other minor tasks. I'm still waiting on that 'Google Duplex' [1] feature they announced years ago that claimed Google would make phone calls for me to make appointments and etc. Make a doctor's appointment? Dispute a charge on my bill? That's what I want.

[1] https://youtu.be/D5VN56jQMWM

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magicalist 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Granted, there have been a lot of times I have trouble finding a website in my history, open tabs or even bookmarks, so I could potentially see how that might be advantageous as long as I was in a situation where I had a second browser for "non-work" related tasks, or this was strictly prohibited in in-private mode.

Yeah, this seems like it would be super helpful, and would work really well with a smaller local only model since it doesn't need to generate nice prose about the results or whatever. Until they keep the data strictly local, though, yes, I'm keeping it off too.

Weirdly, from their help page[1] they mention needing to "Have a high performance computer" as a requirement, and that

> When you turn on "History search, powered by AI," in addition to the page title and URL, the page contents of the website you browse at that time are stored locally.

and that the contents are even encrypted at rest, which makes you start to think they did it the right way, but then, no:

> When you use History search, powered by AI, your searches, generated answers, best matches, and their page contents are sent to Google. This information is used in accordance with the Google Privacy Policy to improve this feature, which includes generative model research and machine learning technologies

They don't outright say it anywhere, but it seems like the implication might be that this is a strictly local only model running (Nano), but then they ruin it by sending the history search results and all the page contents of those results to google so they can use that to improve their models?

Why why why. Looking at the preference in Canary, it's just on/off. No "on, but don't send my search history and the contents of pages I've seen to google".

> I'm still waiting on that 'Google Duplex'

FWIW this has been shipping for a long time. Try doing a reservation through google maps. If there's not open table support or whatever, it'll make the phone call for you.

[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/15305774

	▲	pogue 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Weirdly, from their help page[1] they mention needing to "Have a high performance computer" as a requirement, and that >> When you turn on "History search, powered by AI," in addition to the page title and URL, the page contents of the website you browse at that time are stored locally. > and that the contents are even encrypted at rest, which makes you start to think they did it the right way, but then, no AI is like a beast that has to be continuously fed forever to keep growing, and of course Google knows this. So, they're always going to take your data so they can feed their beast to try and stay, at least abreast, if not ahead of the competition. I'm sure Google is also getting the message from publishers that they're getting sick of having their websites scrapped by GoogleBot only for those results to wind up in the AI Summary & not lead to any actual traffic. So, what could Google do? What if they made everyone who ran Chrome scrape that data for them vicariously just through normal browsing? Not only that, what if in addition to having them scrape that data, but to also process it locally on your computer to save on cloud computing costs? Just a theory... ;) > FWIW this has been shipping for a long time. Try doing a reservation through google maps. If there's not open table support or whatever, it'll make the phone call for you. That's cool about placing the call. Does it actually talk to the person on the other end, set up times & all that kind of stuff like they showed in the demo?
	▲	2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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Scene_Cast2 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I find that Chrome has a fairly crippled history by default (worse than any other browser I've ever used). It's so bad that I ended up installing a history extension. Works much better.

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pogue 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Which one?

I mostly have trouble keeping too many browser tabs open on mobile. Granted, I use Brave & it now organizes closed tabs. On desktop, it has a similar Ai feature for tab management to the one Google described, but it's still not great.

I'd honestly appreciate some kind of AI tab management, history/bookmarks saving, summarizing & organizing that would put my old tabs to some kind of reading list that would remind me what I never closed down the line, archive the links I visited & my bookmarks incase of linkrot they would still be saved. Make sure if I was writing a comment on Reddit or similar site, saved it as a draft, etc, etc. That kind of "Smart" browser management system, that I could preferably run myself or had some privacy guarantees (for whatever they're worth) would definitely something I'd consider paying for.

	▲	Scene_Cast2 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I use History Trends Unlimited. Works decently well for my use cases.

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bobbylarrybobby 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Of course! If you could easily find sites in your history, you wouldn't have to use google search to find them again.

	▲	gowld 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Missing an opportunity to put ads in History.

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nashashmi 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Did you know that chrome only has three months of history? Same with edge. Only Firefox still gives like two years if not more.

If you cleared the history/cache, the browser is spiffy.

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xnx 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> As for their "agentic browsing assistant", I don't have much trouble adding stuff to my shopping cart or other minor tasks.

It looks like it is capable of more complex tasks than that including things like making a comparison table of products based on your criteria.

To extend the grocery example, it would be impressive if it could building a shopping cart and multiple stores so you can chose the one with the best total price/availability.

	▲	pogue 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, if it did that kind of thing, it could definitely be a selling point. Incidentally, I've been doing something similar in Mistral's Le Chat. I went down a rabbit hole to see if it could help me with my skincare routine, and now I've gotten to a point where I'll have it OCR transcribe lists of ingredients on the sides of packaging to see if it's compatible for me, and if not, it gives me product recommendations for alternatives, suggestions on cheaper products & it'll crawl the web to do so. While it won't make me lists or do price comparisons across stores & things like that, what it offers has been incredibly helpful.

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htrp 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

We agree that was completely faked and eventually got killed by legal?

	▲	magicalist 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Recall shipped in April. You just have to have a CPU with support for it, which isn't many.