Search Tools: “Atlas Informatics’ Search Service Acts Like Digital Photographic Memory”

From The Seattle Times:

Atlas Informatics has raised more than $20 million from investors for the search tool, which categorizes every digital item you click on or interact with. The tool lets you search everything in your digital memory that you’ve interacted with on a desktop, which you can then pull up on a computer or smartphone.
Atlas Recall is sort of like a photographic memory, said company founder Jordan Ritter, a serial entrepreneur perhaps best known for co-founding music-streaming site Napster.
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“The problem we’re trying to solve is digital chaos,” Ritter said. “We are used to searching, saving and creating digital trails across several different devices every day, and current search tools are fractured,” he said.
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For now, Atlas works only on Macs and iPhones, but a Windows version will be released soon. Atlas finds anything on your computer — and the results will show up on an iPhone, but the product does not yet capture your iPhone searches.
The product is free for a basic version. Eventually, Atlas will add paid additional features.

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See Also:  Microsoft and Nathan Myhrvold Invest In Atlas, A Search Engine For Your Digital Footprint (via Geekwire)

There are already existing services that comb your digital footprint, but they utilize the APIs for each app or program. Ritter said Atlas is “profoundly” different.
“We take a fundamentally different approach — one that no one has ever done before,” he said. “We drop down a layer into the OS.”
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Privacy, of course, will certainly be a concern for customers with Atlas, given the access to so much personal and private information. Atlas has a “privacy promise” to all users, guaranteeing that they remain in control and own their data at all times. It uses features like “Pause” to give users a way to block Atlas from remembering what you’re doing for a given time period, or “Block,” which lets you block specific URLs or files or apps that you don’t want Atlas recording.

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