Longer-term, Insight intends to layer on a pro version of the service on top of the existing offering available today. The company is backed by a seed round of $1.5 million from Y Combinator, Heartcore Capital and Altair Capital. Insight was built by a small team, including Jain, whose engineering background includes time at Google, Uber and Calico, and fellow co-founders Abhinav Sharma, previously of Quora, Mozilla Labs, and Facebook, and Shubhi Nigam, previously a PM at Newgen Software. So we thought, what if everyone could have this lability to customize their browser experience the way we’re doing for this one population? They could really mould their browser their own needs,” Jain said. The fundamental problem was that the internet is just not one-size-fits-all. “We realized that the problem we were solving isn’t medicine-specific. The team decided to refocus their efforts on another idea they had been tossing around internally for some time. “Our user base disappeared overnight,” she said. And when the pandemic came to the U.S., medical students and medical schools were shut down and a lot of the students were sent home,” explains Insight co-founder and CEO Archa Jain. “A lot of the users we had been working with, up to that point, were medical students. The team had participated in Y Combinator’s winter 2019 session, where they developed a search engine that would filter out the junk medical content and other pages aimed at consumers from the web, in order to direct doctors to sources they could trust.īut things changed when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The idea for Insight actually arose from an earlier effort from a startup focused on building a custom search engine for doctors. It’s dependent on what extensions you have installed and enabled, and how they’re configured. And because you can use extensions together, you could also block the ads on the food blogs and then swipe over to view the site in a “reader mode.” When looking for a recipe, you could limit searches to only a list of your favorite food blogs. For example, when online shopping, you could view the product you’re interested in, then swipe over to see the available coupons, the trusted product reviews, or to comparison shop across other sites. To work around this problem, Insight created a sort of “sub-tab” workflow where you navigate using swiping gestures. Apple restricts what developers are able to do with WKWebView - which means a mobile browser can’t offer the same sort of extensions as you can find on the desktop web. To make these sorts of features work on mobile took some creativity. For example, “if I’m is on a page that matches this URL” or “is on this list of domains,” “then also show this other page.” Using a simple interface similar to something like the iOS Shortcuts app, users can define the conditions for their extension using basic “if, then” logic. In total, the company has around one hundred extensions already created, but it offers tools that allow anyone - even non-developers - to create their own, too. Others let you do things like enable dark mode experiences on sites that don’t offer the feature, check for bias in news via Media Bias Fact Check, or watch videos in picture-in-picture mode on YouTube and other video sites. Another works with ReviewMeta to detect fake reviews on and lets you set price alerts with help from CamelCamelCamel’s price tracker. One extension, for example, can block ads on Google, Amazon and in your social media feeds, like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. The browser can also make suggestions of extensions to try, based on your browsing behavior, if you opt into that experience. Others, meanwhile, can be browsed inside the app, where they’re organized into categories like Search, Shopping, Cooking & Dining, News, Health, and Reading. These features are made available by way of Insight’s extensions, some of which are suggested during the app’s first launch. A new startup called Insight is bringing web browser extensions to the iPhone, with the goal of delivering a better web browsing experience by blocking ads and trackers, flagging fake reviews on Amazon, offering SEO-free search experiences, or even calling out media bias and misinformation, among other things.
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