After posting about Filangy before, their CEO Chirag Chaman was kind enough to pass me on an invitation to try it out, and to provide me with a lot of detailed information for this review.

The service is currently in closed beta and they are asking for feedback from testers, so I've outlined an introduction and my main impressions below.

There are four main components of Filangy:

• The toolbar which enables the service
• WebCache - your personal storage space
• WebMarks - like the name suggests, bookmarks you save to the web, these are given more weight with Filangy's "personal score" ranking system
• The Filangy search engine

Filangy toolbar
The toolbar is for IE on Windows 2000, NT or XP and all
platforms that can install Firefox 1.0.

Like a9.com's toolbar, it
requires you to sign in to your Filangy a/c for it to work.
As you browse the Web, the toolbar quietly sends each URL back to Filangy.com for indexing and addition to your WebCache.

This is done automatically, in the same way as the History feature of a9.com's toolbar - the major difference between Filangy and a9 being that a9 doesn't crawl the full text of the page for you (only the URL and page title), so for instance pages that have poor descriptive titles or none at all are pretty much unfindable using a9's History search.

The toolbars for both browsers are designed to be very simple and minimalistic, containing only a search field, a highlight button, a Save button (which creates a WebMark for that page) and a Pause button to stop Filangy from recording your history.

I would prefer a more attractive toolbar layout similar to, say Google or MSN's than the current minimal design, but that's just my personal preference.

WebCache
The WebCache is a fully text-searchable piece of Filangy's server set aside for your account; any webpage you visit is stored here for later retrieval.
Only the HTML of the page is archived, not the associated images or CSS; image caching will be included probably over the next few months.
Filangy doesn't have a definite limit to how much space each user gets for their cache, and they don't have any current plans for such a limit (unlike Furl's definite 5GB of space).

At the moment there is a half-hour delay before the pages are saved to your cache, Filangy say that this delay will be decreased as the service grows but the real worth to me of a service like this is in finding long-ago visited pages so this doesn't really bother me.

The delay is down to the system of adding the pages - the URL of the page
is sent to Filangy, and they crawl and index the page independently of
your browser - this is a better system than that used at Furl, where
the data is sent straight from your browser, taking quite some time to
send on a slow connection.

WebMarks
WebMarks are basically the pages you specifically bookmark by hitting
the save link beneath the search results, or the save button on the
toolbar - I didn't see the real purpose of Webmarking a page since
every page you visit is saved by default when you're signed in, until I
ran a couple of searches and noticed the personal score gauge beside
each result - the pages you Webmark will be given more weight when you
search, more about this below.

You can import your IE and Firefox bookmarks, but there are no options to export your data if you want to. This is a feature I would require with a service like this - Furl understood the importance of this early on and give their users a
wide variety of options and
formats to take their bookmarks from their servers.

Filangy Search
When you want to find a page you Filangy'd (I know it's not catchy),
you run a search on the toolbar, which brings you to Filangy's very
Google-esque search
engine, that also includes a clustering feature like Vivisimo or Clusty.

Like Google, there are tabs for the category of search you want to do; either a straightforward Web search (Filangy has it's own crawler for the pages users add to their WebCache, and also license the regular
search from a search provider; the results look like a slightly older
Yahoo index), your WebCache and WebMarks.

Beside each Web search result is a preview option - similar to Icerocket.com, this opens an inline frame to display the page, and a save link that lets
you instantly save the result as a WebMark.

Searching in the WebCache tab gives you the main functionality of the service -
the archived copies of the pages you've visited in the past are
available through the cache links beneath each result.

Another touted advantage of using Filangy is the ability to repeat searches you've done in the past - this is a cool idea that could be very convenient, but it's not presented in an easy-to-do way at all; you have to access it from your account page, and there are no links to previous searches on the actual search engine pages, so chances are I will never use this feature as it is.

Personal Score Ranking
The results for WebCache or WebMark searches are ranked by a "personal score" - Filangy tries to deduce which pages are more important to you personally, which is an interesting combination of personalization and archiving.

a9, which I consider Filangy's main competition has no ranking system like this, so a page you bookmark is given no extra importance when you search your a9 history.

The search results are split into two groups - pages you've visited within the last 90 days, and older pages.
Pages older than the 90 day limit have their personal score reset to zero - even if they've been WebMarked - a clever way of ranking the pages on their true use by making the most important factor how often you
visit.

Here's a good explanation of how the personal score ranking
works from Mr. Chaman:

Think of a page as a rechargeable battery.

With every visit you recharge the battery, every day you
don't visit a page it loses a little charge. The end effect is that
pages you have seen in the last few days or WebMarked tend to show up
higher. WebMarked pages also lose their charge a little
slower.

Filangy Privacy
The main concern I would have with a service like this is the privacy of my data, after all, I'm entrusting them with all the pages I view online - very personal information by anyone's standard.

As such they have gone to some lengths to emphasize
their commitment to privacy, providing an authentication code that ties the toolbar installation on a machine to your username and only indexing pages that are publically viewable on the Internet.

Currently there is an option to delete pages individually next to each search result, and options that will show up once an account is used for 60 days to delete low scoring pages, and the pages viewed over the last 60 days.

There is no option to bulk-delete all of your entries if you wish, Filangy are considering adding this, but want to make sure such a permanent removal feature is necessary before they do so.

Reassuringly, the pages you delete are permanently removed from Filangy's servers (this is more reassuring than the vagueness of what happens when you clear your history in a9.com; it's unclear if it still resides somewhere on Amazon's servers).

I will have to use Filangy more to see the full power of it - I'm just beginning to see the clustering feature working now for example - but even in my limited test so far, it shapes up as a useful cross-breed of Furl and the history aspect of a9.

Added:
I noticed I have a couple of Filangy invites to give away, if you post your email address in the comments I'll invite you.

More info:
· Benefits of using Filangy
· Filangy FAQ
· Now that's service.