Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep

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!

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...

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.

How do other people handle this dilemma?

Even solution I can think of involves are a great amount of extra work.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49351802

Can I add NOTES about pages? This might be a good spot to do that...? Maybe the interface can be in a web page instead of terminal?

Before Google took off there was a vibrant ecosystem of FOSS dev around search, all different little aspects of it. Then after Google people stopped fiddling with search, search became "solved" or maybe "must be coded by the big boys". Shame.

Thank you for this, looooong time coming

One of the most useful use cases for me, especially since I work in GTM, is keeping track of new ways to get replies from prospects, whether through cold outbound or things like SEO/GEO optimization. I read at least 2-3 articles a day on this, and it genuinely helps me figure out which ideas are worth trying because I can now keep track of everything I’ve read.

I also have it index my Obsidian notes, which is another little bonus for global search.

I did need to build up quite a few exclusion rules early on, but it's been hands off since.

I like the search ui. my projects become functional but never polished. https://github.com/sbeckeriv/memoir

[1] https://git.brucewillis.sexy/~tombert/fs_index I promise, safe for work, despite the URL.

Is there any site/project that works as a fully customizable personal front-end to all other SERPs?

When I search for something, I always want a link to the best Wikipedia result. This should always be in the same place and have a giant icon/picture.

Then there could be easily clickable links to the SERP pages for Google, DDG, etc. for that query.

A big link to route it to your favorite LLM.

Seems like you could have a really useful "homepage" for all searches that sat in front of all the other sites. It could be local only and would not require indexing the web. Also wouldn't be a files search thing, as Hister appears to be.

Every single web page I’ve found interesting, since the advent of the Web, I have printed to PDF and stored locally for my own personal reference.

Something like 80,000+ files - my own copy of my own Internet - indexable, searchable.

Available offline. Something to read when I am far out to sea.

There is no need to involve third parties in your Internet history - no matter how trustworthy they seem to want to appear.

Print to PDF, and you’ve got everything you need, safe and sound.

https://www.history.co.uk/articles/did-nostradamus-really-pr...

https://stashpad.ai/

It's badly needed, and so far it's working well for me.