alt Hacker NewsOhi, 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/
Replies
I was thinking about making a "personal data search engine". I have almost 30GB of email archives and a bunch of Google Drive and offline files. I am thinking about downloading it all from the cloud and storing it on a large RAID array, with an indexing and search interface (and possibly a local MCP server).
Would Hister be suitable for this? Can it index mbox files? Would it handle this amount of data? Does it have a search API so I can build an MCP server?
Do you plan on adding filterable tags to the ui? Rather than just metadata.
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.
What would be a typical size of the search index, let's say after 5 years of intense browsing?
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 :)
interesting you used AGPL 3 licensing, are you planning a hosted version?
would've been great with a more liberal license
I've been using LinkDing + SingleFile for this. Nice to have another option!
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>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.