alt Hacker NewsI'm working on a self-hosted search service called Hister (https://hister.org/ - https://github.com/asciimoo/hister) with the goal to reduce dependence on online search engines and AI answers.
Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface with offline result previews & detailed query language to explore collected content or quickly fall back to traditional search engines.
It can provide a privacy-respecting search experience for serving "recall" type searches where users retrieve previously visited content, but falls short in "discovery" type searches (yet).
This was the first AI project I ended up working on as well, except I approached from building a meta-search first. I only added support for a local index recently (via SQLite FTS 5). But I haven't shared my project, whereas you have a truly fantastic webpage for yours. Plus going the extra distance with a terminal interface and MCP server too.
Much kudos. I hope more people discover how powerful even a local search index of previously visited content can be. And I hope more people can build large indexes as well, so we're not just relying on Brave & Mojeek & Marginalia (and EUSP) to rescue us for the fallback discovery searches.