Hister: Build Your Own Private Search Engine
Hister is an open-source tool that lets you index and search your personal data—browser history, files, and more—without relying on third-party services. With 3.8k stars on GitHub, it offers a privacy-focused alternative to cloud-based search, giving you full control over your information.
Your own search engine
- asciimoo
Ohi, author here! Thanks for posting Hister. Feel free to A.M.A.
My first free software search project was Searx, a privacy respecting metasearch engine, but because of the limitations of the metasearch concept, I've decided to take a different approach.
Hister builds a personal search index from pages you visit, bookmarks, browser history, local files, and crawled websites. It stores extracted content with offline result previews, so information remains searchable even when the original page changes or disappears. It supports full text and semantic search, can run entirely on your own machine, and includes a web interface, command line tools, and an MCP endpoint for assistant integrations.
Website: https://hister.org/
Tiny read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/
Ps.: It looks like our name conflicts with a registered trademark in the US. The owner of the other project has asked us to change it, so we’ll probably need to comply sooner or later.
Name suggestions are welcome! Ideally, the new name should be relatively short, sound good, and have an available .org domain.
Thanks!
- devdoshi
Love this kind of system, so many useful mashup apps to build on top!
- taude
Kind of related to this in that I built it to hoard knowledge from web pages I've visited along with implementing a Karpathy-style LLM Wiki, but the knowledge is collected automatically from sources I browse.
I have it up on GitHub, but I don't think anyone should use my implementation.
Loosely, what I built:
* On each of my machines I have a cron job running that looks at all my web browser history (usualy it's inspecting the brower's SQLlite across firefox and chrome). If it matches my rule list: hacker news stories, certain reddits, etc. it'll grab the page, convert to markdown and drop in my Obsidian Vault incoming.
* It has a whole de-duping architecture since I might open the same page on multiple machines. Uses the CloudFlare SQLITE D1 storage for tracking the processed links.
* it'll then trigger the LLM to do some Karpathy wiki style taxonomy assignment to the articles, organize them, create an index etc.
It's then available for my "bot" stuff to do writings for me.... I will probably write more about it at some point. I'm not certain it's totally useful and not just a yak-shave on hoarding knowledge.
Ai-drafted article on this [1]
Example AI-Drafted article based on some discussions the other day on Ollma vs LLama.cpp [2]
[1] https://taude.xyz/posts/how-archivore-turns-browsing-into-a-...
[2] https://taude.xyz/posts/skip-ollama-run-llama-cpp-directly-o...
- rao-v
I'd love a extension setting to only send tabs that were visible for ~4+ seconds.
I built myself a little extension last year that tracks what information I was looking at, but focused on generating "new info" recaps for the day / week.
I realized that I open / quick view a lot of pages and close them, which is a strong signal that I don't care about that specific page, and it shouldn't be a source of "new insights" that I learnt that day (since I probably don't care about that topic).
I'd love to re-try a simpler version of that project that builds on Hister as a backend actually.
- jval43
Google Chrome did this in 2008. Full-text search over all visited pages, stored offline. It was very useful and I miss it.
Nobody seems to remember it, even though it was a headline feature. Was removed in 2013, I think due to technical constraints.
Will definitely try this.
- computator
I'd like to use it, but I'm hesitant to use anything that isn't a reviewed and approved package in my Linux distribution. Even if the chance is 1% that a program I download has malware or security problems that even the author doesn't know about (eg., due to libraries used), odds are that my system's going to be compromised if I run 50 such programs. This extends to browser add-ons, bookmarklets, and extensions too.
How do other people handle this dilemma?
Even solution I can think of involves are a great amount of extra work.
- phyzome
Roughly in the same space is Zotero <https://www.zotero.org/> which is intended as a way of organizing research materials but is also a great way of quickly archiving web pages you've visited, including quick tagging and full text search.
- 361994752
I had the same problem for a very long time but it is largely solved now. I started to simply ask chatgpt "hey I read something about x, y month ago but can't find it now". There is a surprisingly high chance chatbot can just give the exact answer back to me, usually with extra interesting reading materials as a plus.