Sankofa

Sankofa is a Chrome extension published by Vectara, the company behind a generative-AI search API. Its premise is simple: your browser forgets almost everything, so Sankofa quietly remembers the content of the sites you visit and makes that content searchable again. To do that it indexes page text into a corpus inside your own Vectara account.

Setup is a one-time process. You sign up for a free Vectara account, create a corpus, and enter the relevant details into Sankofa. From then on you can index a single page on demand, index just a block of text, or instruct the extension to automatically index every page you visit after a delay you choose. Because the corpus is yours, you keep control over what gets stored.

Once content is indexed, Sankofa turns your history into a small personal knowledge base. You can ask questions in a ChatGPT-like chat and receive answers built from the pages you have read, search for pages on a topic rather than by exact title, or surface pages similar to the one you are currently on. It is especially handy for research sessions where you read dozens of tabs and later need to recall a specific fact.

Because it depends on your own Vectara corpus, the useful capacity and speed follow your Vectara plan, and the extension itself is free. It is listed as version 0.0.2 with a February 2024 update, and the store reports web-history and website-content permissions, so it is best suited to users who are comfortable routing page text through a third-party indexing service.