Launch HN: Browser Buddy (YC W24) – A recommendation system for Internet writing
browserbuddy.comHey HN! We're Arnav and Jeremy and we're building Browser Buddy, a recommendation system you can chat with to find quality Internet writing based on your interests and aspirations.
As we've grown up, this writing was a source of inspiration that helped us discover ideas and opportunities we didn't even know we were looking for (ex. applying to YC because of PG's essays).
But despite so many new creators and websites coming online, the best of the open Internet remains hard-to-find, scattered across personal sites (https://www.paulgraham.com/, https://www.eugenewei.com/), niche publications (https://www.noemamag.com/, https://worksinprogress.co/), and various independent publishing platforms (https://bearblog.dev/, https://substack.com/, https://medium.com/). Outside of "social" media platforms, there's very high friction to get into a new subject or stumble upon credible people who write about your interests.
We feel there should be an easier (and mobile-friendly) way to find fantastic media and curate this intentional, interesting information diet for yourself.
Browser Buddy is an iOS app that curates this interesting, thought-provoking writing for you from across the Internet. It's particularly good to explore topics like programming, startups, math, philosophy, machine learning, and design.
Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmEeo4mjc7U
Here are some example recommendations:
"I'm trying to grow my early stage consumer internet company": https://cdixon.org/2015/01/31/come-for-the-tool-stay-for-the... https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-the-biggest-consumer-...
"I want to learn how to build beautiful web interfaces": https://frankchimero.com/blog/2015/the-webs-grain/ https://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design/
"Teach me the history of the Internet": https://www.mic.com/impact/how-geocities-webrings-made-the-9... https://computerhistory.org/blog/history-of-the-future-octob...
"I'm trying to read more about games and game theory": https://franklantz.substack.com/p/playing-balatro https://joecarlsmith.com/2022/03/16/on-expected-utility-part...
"I've been getting into network science and network theory": https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the... https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/seeing-like-a-network
We trained a language model to recommend webpages how people do through hyperlinks. Hyperlinks can be an expressive way to describe a webpage (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/07/01/the-rhetoric-of-the-hy...), but there's a lot of spam and low-quality linking online that would serve as bad training examples. We found the structure of the link graph to still be a fantastic way to understand what content is salient, and used it heavily to filter and build our dataset. The resulting model is best for expressive, exploratory queries where you describe what you are looking for (like a prompt to an LLM) rather than entering in keywords (like a search on Google). This model is the main "curation" step in our system that picks from our index of ~150 million (and growing) webpages.
We built Browser Buddy to try and recreate the feeling of getting a thoughtful recommendation from a smart friend. Our early users have described it as a "refreshing stream of timely and timeless writing", "serendipitous discovery", "rabbit holes that feel joyfully unfunneled". We are iterating on the concept and how it's presented, but we really value the HN community and would love to hear what you all think:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/browser-buddy/id6752281959
Thank you for your time and being a part of the Internet we love!
Jeremy (jeremy@browserbuddy.com) and Arnav (arnav@browserbuddy.com)
I really like this concept. What's the advantage of using your app instead of using ChatGPT etc to surface this kind of content?
I get you have this 'curated' dataset but how much better than a good prompt for ChatGPT do you think this is?
(not intending to be negative, I'm genuinely curious)
Our goal with our dataset is to only focus on the personal web. The search APIs that LLMs use rank a lot of SEO/commercial content highly that we were not interested in
To measure that we do better here, we made evaluations based on how real people recommend websites on their blogs/writing/articles. For example, we tend to surface https://every.to/p/invisible-details-of-interaction-design rather than https://userpilot.com/blog/interaction-design-principles/ when searching for advice on getting better at interaction design.
Interesting concept, though I’m not sure I’d install something called `browserbuddy` on my phone.
Not available in my country / region says the AppStore. Greetings from Europe.
ah, i submitted some EU trader requirements stuff. could you shoot me an email @ jeremy@browserbuddy.com so i can let you know when we get approved?
Browser* Buddy
*Not available in a browser.
We originally started with a webapp but found ourselves using it much more on our phones.
Happy to bring back the webapp if there’s strong interest!
Well, by limiting yourselves to iPhone you are eliminating at least half of smartphone users, and 100% of non-smartphone users.
Please do. Also try making a newtab page.
Would be much easier to try. I was expecting a chrome extension.
yes please bring it back. browsers work perfectly fine on phones
lol yeah why not do webapp so much easier than ios
I've wanted something like this for a long time! Waiting for the android /browser release!
I'm sorry we don't support those yet! Can you send me an email @ jeremy@browserbuddy.com so I can shoot you an email when we have a browser version?
Go Hoos good work Wadehra
congrats arnav, you've come a long way from the balz days :)
Translation: You, Android user, is a second class citizen. And you, you are using the browser??? I won't even describe you, because you are less than that.
Why isn't there a working website? You've been up since 2024
Seriously, the product focuses on personal and independent content, primarily published on websites, but the app only works in iOS. That seems like a fundamental mismatch.
My concern with something like this is content marketing or other forms of surreptitious advertising.
Will you clearly indicate “boosted” authors/publishers/pieces?
We don’t boost any authors/publishers/pieces. We don’t have any specific plan to monetize right now, but many AI-based products seem to work well as paid subscriptions vs using an advertising model.
>> We don’t have any specific plan to monetize right now
YC has changed. It's like we're back in the late 90's!
This is what I'm using Hacker News for. It doesn't require an app, it's super fast, the curating is done by real people (not by AI), and often the comments add a lot of value to the discussed article.
We check hackernews every day too but often have a hard time exploring specific interests that are not currently trending.
You're right though, the community/comments add a ton of value and its something we're thinking on.
the tool should be on the open web as a primary, not closed off in a walled garden mobile app.
I tend to find substantially more value in HN comments than in the posted articles.
[flagged]
I didn't intend for my comment to be mean. Generally, I think that sometimes the most useful advice one can give a founder (like myself) is "you should consider to pivot". Sure it's not fun to hear, but it can save you a couple of months. In this specific case, I think it'll help the founders to consider that the pain they're aiming to solve might already be answered, better, by existing simpler solutions. I don't think the best comment to leave is always "Amazing idea, wonderful execution!!!".
I didn't think your comment was mean, I just think sometimes people are a little too quick to tell other makers their idea won't work without putting enough time/thought/consideration into if that's true.
When it comes to finding product market fit (and providing feedback into if it exists) sometimes it helps to consider whether or not you are in that market.
I am never buying a Labubu but you better believe there is product market fit there.
Why even give "advice"? Why not phrase it as:
"I get a lot of value from HN: it's fast, doesn't require an app, curating is done by real people and the comments add a lot. I'd be curious to learn what types of content your product surfaces that's different from HN?"
How much research did you guys do on the name? This might be the most amazing product ever, but I'll never know. I'm not inclined to install anything with the name "X Buddy". For me, it brings the negative associations from this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy
It's not a knock on anything you've done, because it looks pretty nice. But, just based on the name, I'm not sure I know what it does or why I'd want it. That's a decent amount of inertia to overcome to get someone to install an app on their phone called "browser buddy". It just screams malware to me... but maybe I'm just paranoid.
Yikes! We'd never heard of that.
We picked "Browser Buddy" to name our surfing penguin logo.
I suspected you hadn't, which is why I wanted to bring it up. It's admittedly a pretty dated reference, but was really common right around 2000. At least, it was commonly installed where I was around 2001. I don't think it was malware right away (it's been a while), but by the end of it's run, it seemed sketchy at best.
It's a tough balance to get right... you want to be approachable and friendly so that people will try your app. But you don't want to come across as a big purple gorilla or Clippy. I do like the penguin!