abhinavsharma/hypersearch

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Hyperweb

_{Coming soon for Firefox and Opera. Microsoft Edge users can install from the Chrome store.}

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Hyperweb enhances all major search engines (Google, DuckDuckGo, Amazon, etc.) with results from trusted sources in the sidebar and removing results from blocked sources

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• Purpose & General Info
• Features
• Installation
• License
• Privacy Policy
• Development

Philosophy and Principles

What's going wrong with search?

We believe that finding high quality information on the open internet has become increasingly hard. Many have noticed this trend but a superior alternative remains elusive.

Search engines are mostly used for head queries, (simple that many people often look up) but make most of their revenue on tail queries (complex research queries with high financial or life decision stakes).

People build the habit of their default search engine based mostly on the head, and to be good at the head, you need lots of data on what people like clicking through to, thus making the market leader's position even stronger.

But tail queries, often the most important queries users make, are declining in quality because

1. The organic results cannot be much better than the ads, otherwise too much revenue is lost.

2. Publisher revenue is getting smaller relative to search engines', so larger publishers often make more money by affiliate selling to expensive products (e.g. review sites) or by paywall-blocking content.

3. Large publishers win out in search results over authentic user generated content because people click on familiar brands and because they can spend more on SEO budgets.

How can search be improved?

We don't think it's easy to make an alternative search engine that's much better, but we do think that there are clever ways to use existing search engines to get to the best content.

This is the underlying core philosophy behind Hyperweb.

Don't re-invent another search engine with the same incentives. Instead, augment search for power users

We do not try to replace your search engine, but instead augment your existing search engine with results from your trusted sources and block results from sites you don't trust.

We provide often useful filters out of the box, e.g. Reddit, Hacker News, but you as the user are free to customize your filters to your liking.

BYO search engine

We designed Hyperweb to be compatible with as many search engines as possible, with support out of the box for many major search engines.

This includes vertical specific search engines like Amazon for shopping.

If we don't yet support a search engine you'd like to see, please raise an issue.

Search is not just the links

Search is ultimately about making decisions, and that doesn't just happen on a page with links.

Hyperweb augments non-search pages with useful information like review vetting and price checks to help you make decisions better

Suggested filters but full customizability

As we learnt how to filter search results well, we build certain popular filters into the extension by default, such as Reddit, Hacker News, domain-specific filters such as "Sources Doctors Read but the user is free to disable these default sources as well as create their own filters.

Create your own rules

Hyperweb has the ability to create custom filters for any website.

The schema is based on our mobile app Hyperweb and filters made in one are usually (though not always) compatible with the other.

Installation

Hyperweb is currently available on the Chrome Web Store for Chrome and Edge users.

License

GPLv3.

Privacy

Hyperweb does not collect any data by default.

Privacy Policy.

FAQs

Hyperweb asks for access to all sites, how can I trust it?

We've tried to maximize your trust by

• Never logging any data to servers, see our privacy policy.
• Open sourcing all the code
• You can always unzip the browser extension code and inspect it
• You can also inspect the network traffic generated by the extension.

If you have are any other questions or we can do more to assure you, you can raise an issue.

I see a lot of captchas when trying to use Google. What should I do?

Usually, these go away after a few times of solving the CAPTCHAs. Loading a search result page followed by another similar one very quickly is an unusual pattern and Google finds it suspicious.

How is Hyperweb funded?

We make paid iOS apps Hyperweb and Insight Browser that bring in revenue. Hyperweb is a free and open source project we've built for the desktop community.

Development Notes

Even though the project is open source, the current group of developers is small. If you'd like to help, feel free to reach out to me directly - [email protected]

Project Structure

/src Extension source compiled with Webpack using TypeScript

/public Public assets via chrome.runtime.getUrl()

/tasks Package scripts and configuration

/releases Distributable extension packages

Modules

See package.json for the project dependencies (manual).

Onboarding

Introduction flow with license registration and privacy settings

Sidebar

Main UI module injected to the browser tabs in an iframe

Engines

Search Results Page (SERP) mutations (extract results URLs, reordering, gutter units and overlays)

Storage

Asynchronous extension storage using chrome.storage API (local + sync)

Development Workflow

Install

~ make setup or ~ npm install --legacy-peer-deps

Note: legacy-peer-deps flag to allow react-typist^2.0.5

Develop

~ make dev or ~ npm run watch

Build

~ make prod or ~ npm run build

Release

~ make ship

Note: check the JQ installation page for your specific platform if needed

Browser Integration

Chrome | Firefox | Edge

Suggested Tools

Storage Area Explorer - Demo / Download

Auto Rename Tag | Auto rename paired HTML/XML tag.

Better Comments | Improve your code commenting by annotating with alert, informational, TODOs, and more!

Bracket Pair Colorizer | A customizable extension for colorizing matching brackets.

CodeMetrics | Computes complexity in TypeScript / JavaScript files.

Document This | Automatically generates detailed JSDoc comments in TypeScript and JavaScript files.

Import Cost | Display import/require package size in the editor.

Markdown Preview Enhanced | Markdown Preview Enhanced ported to vscode.

Margin Colours | Display colour badge next to line numbers when any hex, rgb(a) or hsl(a) colours are written in a file.

NPM Intellisense | Visual Studio Code plugin that autocompletes npm modules in import statements.

Sort | Sort lines or words.

CHANGELOG

hypersearch's Issues

www.google.com refused to connect. ERR_BLOCKED_BY_RESPONSE

Describe the bug
Occasionally, since installing Hyperweb, I get an error when trying to open google and some other websites:

www.google.com is blockedwww.google.com refused to connect.
ERR_BLOCKED_BY_RESPONSE

I checked in the network request and I see:

cross-origin-opener-policy: same-origin-allow-popups; report-to="gws"
This document was blocked from loading in an iframe with a sandbox attribute because this document specified a cross-origin opener policy.

I don't get the same behaviour in incognito mode or after I've disabled the extension.

Has anyone else seen this behaviour?

Thanks

To Reproduce
Install Hyperweb
Occasionally receive the above error when trying to search google.

Expected behavior
Google search results are displayed

Screenshots
If applicable, add screenshots to help explain your problem.

Desktop (please complete the following information):
MacOS Ventura 13.2.1, on a iMac.
Chrome Version 112.0.5615.49 (Official Build) (x86_64)

Amazon buy now popup window: Can't click "place order", because it's covered by hyperseach UI

Describe the bug
Amazon buy now popup window: Can't click "buy now", because it's covered by hyperseach UI.

To Reproduce

1. On amazon.nl, select product and click "buy now"
2. on popup window, try to click on "place order" if you can. I can't because it's covered by UI from hypersearch.

Expected behavior
Allow me to click

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS: mac os montery
• Browser firefox
• Version 104.0

This is a great idea.

I'm keen to see where this goes!
I tried to hack something like this together by using whitelists in uBlacklist.
But it didn't work because uBlocklist just filters the results on the search page after the page has been sent to your browser, which generally resulted in a completely empty browser page.

Keen for the Firefox extension!

Some Feature requests

Thanks for making Hyperweb, it's a very useful extension! Now I use Selection search to search when I'm browsing, but the concept of the right panel and advanced filters it's better.

I have some feature suggestions:

• A whitelist of domains: Activate the Hyperweb overlay box (bottom right corner) only in the sites that you specify and show it only when you click the Hypersearch button, or use the keyboard shortcut. For example an x button in the overlay that remembers.
• A keyboard shortcut to open the right panel.
• Search selected text in Hyperweb. Selected text automatically adds to the search query when you click the overlay.
• Context menu that lets you send selected text to a specific local filter from your list of filters.
• A way to adjust the size and position of the overlay box. It's big and sometimes interferes with the content.
• A way to adjust the width of the right panel.
• Rename tabs option when you add multiple sites in a local filter. I cannot differentiate between search engines because all share the same filter name (now I have to add one by one in separate filters). A name text box would be nice.
• Export/Import settings.
• Add mycroftproject search engines database like Selection search extension does.
• A ? help button with a guide on how to create 'your own filters', basically a link to here Add it to your README in GitHub and in the browsers stores description.

That's what I can think for now, thanks again for your extension 😉

Disable ad hiding

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I don't like it when ads are hidden. Hiding shopping ads- fine. Hiding text ads on google- it annoys me, because I know which of the links are ads, and click on them if the main search doesn't work. Google text ads are useful for discovery of new products.

Describe the solution you'd like
A way to disable ad hiding.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Using CSS styles to hide the ad hiding banner.

Injected stylesheet messes up layout of some websites

Describe the bug
This extension injects this style into every website:

html, body {
    width: 100% !important;
    max-width: 100% !important;
}

This messes up the layouts of some websites. A particularly bad example is https://xkcd.com/

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Have Hyperweb enabled
2. Go to https://xkcd.com/

Expected behavior
Layout is unaffected.

Screenshots

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS: Windows
• Browser: Chrome and Firefox
• Version: Chrome 103, Firefox 103

Smartphone (please complete the following information):
Untested

Experiencing login problems when Hypersearch is enabled

Describe the bug
I know this is gonna sound strange, but my logins to certain websites will bug out when I enable the Hypersearch extension. I noticed this on certain websites. On reddit.com I appear logged out on first load, then logged in on refresh. My session also does not carry over to new tabs. On lichess.org and osu.ppy.sh they straight up refuse login and forgot password entries.

To Reproduce

1. Attempt login on any of above websites with Hypersearch extension enabled
2. Cannot login. osu.ppy.sh specifically throws a 403 forbidden.

Expected behavior
I should log in without any issue.

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS: Windows 10.0.19044 Build 19044
• Firefox 99.0.1 (64-bit)

Lens icons show up broken on Firefox 100.0 64bit on Manjaro Linux

It's not an interaction with another addon, as disabling all others does not resolve it.
This is what it looks like, as you can see the sidebar is unusable: