Hister – A private, full content search index that you control (hister.org)
125 points by auraham 4 days ago
asciimoo 2 hours ago
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.
Project page: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister
Tiny read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/
Groxx 2 hours ago
>Hister builds a personal search index from pages you visit, bookmarks, browser history, local files, and crawled websites.
Immediately interested and will check it out, thank you! I've wanted a "search stuff you've seen online" tool for a long time, but everything seems to be research-oriented or "archive but don't search" or some weird combination that means it's nigh useless to me. I've got decades of bookmarks and archives and I've kinda been stuck grepping them at best (it's rare but I do sometimes want a page I saw once three years ago and I love having that option), while hoping someone would build something better.
One question if ya don't mind, while I explore: any chance of singlefile support? Content-extraction is useful in lots of situations (e.g. wallabag) and it's a great default, but sometimes it fails and sometimes you really do want the page, relatively close to how it actually was. Singlefile does that much better than most, and it does so well enough (and manually-handle-able enough if needed) that I don't feel any desire to switch to WARCs or similar.
Though specifically I'm probably looking for something like "content-extract everything" + "key combo to save singlefile version too" + "upload singlefile archives to backfill / recover". Like 99% of the time content extraction is preferred, and I'm glad to see it... it's just not always enough, and having to go elsewhere for exceptions breaks a lot of the utility.
asciimoo an hour ago
Exactly! I had the very same issues before Hister.
> One question if ya don't mind, while I explore: any chance of singlefile support?
Yes, partially. Hister can already import HTML files created by SingleFile, but there is no direct integration yet. In the longer term, I would like the SingleFile extension to be able to send snapshots directly to Hister.
Groxx an hour ago
iambateman an hour ago
Very cool. Does it work to connect my phone and laptop to the same firehose?
I often find myself irritated because I read an article on my phone 6 months ago and the history is gone.
asciimoo an hour ago
You can host Hister on a home server and access it from multiple devices.
Automatic page capture on mobile currently requires Firefox, since mobile Chrome does not support browser extensions.
dented42 2 hours ago
What’s the safari story look like right now?
asciimoo an hour ago
Safari support is currently stalled in this PR: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/pull/46. I do not have access to macOS, so help with development and testing would be very welcome.
oulipo an hour ago
You should integrate with Karakeep.app, it's only natural that you'd want both a search engine, and a nice "archive" and "article pretty view" features :)
asciimoo an hour ago
What do you mean by integration? Hister already supports importing data from Karakeep, Linkding, Linkwarden, Readeck, Shaarli, and wallabag: https://hister.org/docs/import
zuzululu 2 hours ago
interesting you used AGPL 3 licensing, are you planning a hosted version?
would've been great with a more liberal license
asciimoo 2 hours ago
> are you planning a hosted version
Not in the near term. Right now I am focused on developing Hister rather than operating a hosted service. There are already plenty of centralized hosted search engines, so my longer term interest is in federation and distributed search. I want to make the core system mature first.
> would've been great with a more liberal license
It depends on how do you define liberal. =] I chose AGPLv3+ because I want Hister to remain free software and available to their users.
zuzululu a minute ago
zargon 32 minutes ago
pbronez an hour ago
I've been using LinkDing + SingleFile for this. Nice to have another option!
asciimoo an hour ago
That is a great combo. My main friction with it is having to manually capture pages I want to keep.
quasigod 36 minutes ago
I just finished setting this up yesterday and I'm kind of obsessed with it. I was previously a heavy user of Karakeep, but I hated forgetting to save something and losing it. I also think Hister's semantic search is a better solution than AI generated summaries and tags. Support for local docs is super cool too, I have it set up to index my org notes directory.
renegat0x0 an hour ago
I have created something similar, yet different. I maintain my own Internet domain index.
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
Also I maintain android app that can be used to search places.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.github.rumcajs.offlineweb...
I believe hister you have to fill in with your data, right?
wmchen an hour ago
I set this up a few months ago based on asciimoo's comments on HN, and barely used it at first, but I realized not too long ago that it could be a pretty useful research tool for one of my hobbies (award travel), that revolves around being in the know around various concepts and quirks.
I scraped and imported posts from the blogs I regularly reference for award travel, then hooked it up to OpenCode/Codex as an MCP server and used that corpus for research on those topics. So I can ask things like "has anyone ever mentioned running into this problem before?" [1]
If you have a hobby or working situation that requires you to regularly reference a core set of websites or reference materials, Hister provides almost all the tools out of the box to start a search engine against it. The default datasets they promote include the Python Stlib, MDN and RFC corpus, as an example. [2]
asciimoo an hour ago
Wow, this is a really inspiring use case and blog post. Thanks for sharing it.
What tools or features would Hister need to support your complete search workflow?
lnenad an hour ago
I LOVE the concept. I will play around with the execution, if it works as described this is a great product.
Carrok 2 hours ago
I tried this out this week and liked it but really wish this project had some form of auth. Opening the contents of every page you’ve ever visited, even to the local network, is not the best idea.
androidu an hour ago
I've set it up today with OIDC AuthN (Keycloak), removed the username/password fields & kept only OIDC, it's working flawless.
Also indexed data is persisted on a per-user basis, so you got this isolation and certainty that your searches will not be polluted by your family's
asciimoo 2 hours ago
Hister supports token based, password based, and OIDC/OAuth authentications with optional multi-user handling. Details about user handling can be found here: https://hister.org/docs/user-handling
It also has a "public mode" where anyone can search the indexed content, but only authenticated users can add or modify it.
Carrok an hour ago
It seemed like the public mode was the default when I set it up. If so, that’s a fairly dangerous default as keeping a “clean” history with no secrets leaked seems neigh impossible.
asciimoo an hour ago
robotmay an hour ago
Ooh I’ve been thinking about this idea for years, I’m glad someone beat me to it. Guess I have something to play with over the rest of the weekend!
thataccount an hour ago
I am guessing the author didn't do a lot of research on the name as "Hister" is a name that people link to Hitler through Nostradamus: https://www.history.co.uk/articles/did-nostradamus-really-pr...
Got enough Hitler in my life with Google...
asciimoo 34 minutes ago
The name coming from HISTory on STERoids. When I checked the name I found only a beetle and part of the Danube called "Hister".
wolfy1993 an hour ago
I'll be honest I wouldn't blame OP for not finding this (I found a species of hister beetle before anything to do with Hitler)
I feel this is a weird spin on the "Clicks to Hitler" game
thataccount an hour ago
I was not using Wikipedia to get there. This is something I immediately recognized from research about World War II and possible prophetic fulfillment. I definitely wasn't playing a game when I came across this information either, but I get your drift.
ButlerianJihad 39 minutes ago
alexnewman 44 minutes ago
Time to shameless plug my own easy to host your own content search index
Webtm.io
All open source and small enough to deploy. I deploy to cf webworkers so it’s the only place it’s tested.
One cool thing is we work on iOS, chrome and friends, Firefox and pretty much everywhere. We do require you bring your own LLM though.
exe34 an hour ago
Can it import browser bookmarks? It says browser history and a bunch of other bookmark services but not specifically browser bookmarks.
asciimoo an hour ago
Yes, it can import data from various sources, including browser history, and popular self-hosted bookmarking apps: https://hister.org/docs/import
exe34 40 minutes ago
Is this reply from Gemini? Because I'm used to gemini gaslighting me. The answer is the opposite of my question.
asciimoo 35 minutes ago
shevy-java 2 hours ago
This is like Hipster. But missing a 'p'.