Sankofa – Browser extension to semantically search your history
Hey there HN! I lead Product at Vectara. Some of us read a lot of articles on the web (like those on HN) and we were desperately trying to recall the text we read -- using semantic search because we might not have remembered the exact text we read. (Or ask questions about the content -- ChatGPT style.) Sankofa is a new browser extension that can automatically index web pages you visit and let you search / ask questions about that content. We built it using Vectara's retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG) platform and hope this is useful to folks. This is an initial release: we would love…
Sankofa – Browser extension to semantically search your history launched on January 30, 2024 with 19 votes, #999 of 4,437 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 2 years on.
In plain words
Sankofa is a browser extension that automatically indexes web pages as users visit them, enabling semantic search and question-answering about previously read content. Built on Vectara's retrieval-augmented-generation platform, it helps users recall articles and information without needing to remember exact wording. The extension is designed for people who read extensively online and need to quickly retrieve and query specific information from their browsing history.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
We built a powerful sample app called Sankofa, powered by Vectara, that helps you remember all sites you visited on the web, and ask questions about their content. “I’m pretty sure I saw an article about this new LLM, but for the life of me I can’t find it.” Today we’re announcing a new sample application that uses Vectara to solve this problem – we call it Sankofa , which means to retrieve in the Twi language of Ghana . It is often represented by a bird with its head turned backwards. With Sankofa, all of the text of every webpage you’ve ever visited becomes searchable with Vectara’s powerful hybrid search. To use Sankofa, first sign-up for your free Vectara account, and create a corpus…from vectara.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey there HN! I lead Product at Vectara. Some of us read a lot of articles on the web (like those on HN) and we were desperately trying to recall the text we read -- using semantic search because we might not have remembered the exact text we read. (Or ask questions about the content -- ChatGPT style.) Sankofa is a…
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