HistoryHound is among the ten applications I keep opened in my Dock, because I know that it’s always working in the background to index every webpage I visit.
I don’t view HistoryHound everyday, but it has saved me lots of time and frustration in searching webpages I’ve previously visited. And when I’m conducting web searches for a particular topic, I don’t have to manually bookmark sites I visit, because I know HistoryHound does it for me automatically.
HistoryHound’s UI doesn’t have the modern Yosemite flat design, but keeps tracks of the webpages you download, and then you can search and filter what it has captured. For instance, I’m preparing to write an article about the iOS built-in camera. I searched several sites on the subject a few weeks ago. While Safari keeps a history of my bookmarks and searches, it doesn’t do it as well as HistoryHound. So now, using HistoryHound, I can easily see all the pages I visited related to that subject.
Filtering Searches
With HistoryHound, you can filter the webpages it captures by exact or partial matches, or by using Spotlight-style operators, like ! & | () *.
Your queries can be based on a specified time period, and can include searching your Safari bookmarks, cache, and history. HistoryHound can also be set to save downloads for other web browsers you use.
Other Features
I let HistoryHound update its index every five minutes, and I have it remember pages for up to 80 days (do this in preferences.) You can click on the Utilities button in the toolbar to enable a manual index of your most recently visited pages.
You can also select and exclude particular webpages from the HistoryHound index, by right-clicking on a search result and selecting to remove the specified page from the index, or exclude it and pages with similar URL’s.
Search terms are also saved, and can be accessed and used again from the drop-down in the search box.
The pages of selected pages are downloaded into the HistoryHound web browser, but there’s also a convenient Browser button to open those pages in your main web browser.
Conclusion
You might not need HistoryHound everyday, but it sure comes in handy when you need to quickly retrieve webpages you’ve downloaded before. HistoryHound is great to view and reference on a second screen as you write in another application.
HistoryHound is available for a 30-day trial download, and it cost $14.95 for a single license.
