Utility helps you find that lost Web site

It happened to me again the just the other day. I was surfing the Internet and saw something that triggered one of those serendipitous moments.

You see something and all of a sudden you remember that you saw something else that causes you to come up with a whole new idea or move in a direction you may not have considered.

The trouble is there's a good chance you won't remember exactly when or where you saw the Web site you're now trying to find again.

Oh sure, there's your Web browser's history file that keeps track of every Web page you've accessed, but have you ever tried to use that as a reasonable resource?

A browser's history file consists of a new folder that's automatically created every day. Within each of those folders is a chronologically ordered listing of every site you visited for that day.

If you surf onto only a few pages a day, chances are you'll be able to find the page you are trying to locate.

But if you're someone who has a whole lot of Internet interaction, then trying to find a page you saw a few days or weeks ago is tantamount to finding a virtual needle.

And the site URLs listed in the history file more than likely aren't going to be much help. Web-site addresses can be really cryptic, so just looking at long lists of them isn't going to do you much good.

Image better than text

In much the same way that a picture is better than a thousand words, so is an image of a Web site better than that same number of text addresses. You will have a better chance of spotting that elusive site if you actually see it.

And that's exactly what BrowseBack from Smile On My Mac does for you. The utility also offers features that let you organize previously visited Web sites by a specific topic, and even find sites that might have changed or been completely removed since you last surfed in that direction.

When you install BrowseBack, the utility will ask how far back you want to maintain your browser history. Be careful, because it takes about 10 minutes for every day back you wish to begin the history.

For me, I found it best to go back only a day.

Once you have BrowseBack installed and activated, you just browse as you would normally do. But when the time comes to find a previous Web site, no longer do you need stare at cryptic URLs.

When you activate BrowseBack, the entire screen goes to milky white, and you see an overlay of every Web page presented to you in a thumbnail format. Looking at the display reminds me of a deck of cards that's spread out on a table.

As you move the mouse pointer over the thumbnail page images, each page moves up, forward and magnifies, making it easier to see and read the page's contents.

Rows of pages

BrowseBack displays the thumbnail page spreads three at a time with scrolling arrows at the beginning and end of the page rows. These let you move to the next row of thumbnails as well as jumping to the very beginning or end.

In addition, BrowseBack will show you related information such as its title, URL and the date you last accessed it.

You can refine your search by the actual content of the visited Web pages via keywords as well as filtering by a start and end date. And when you do find that elusive Web page, just click on it and you're taken there instantly.

BrowseBack supports most of the major Web browsers such as FireFox, Safari and Internet Explorer.

BrowseBack runs on Macintosh OS X 10.4 and later and sells for $29.95.