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.
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.
Hi asciimoo, seems like this is the second time Hister is hitting the HN front page in a month, so congrats on the success!
Question for you: For the less tech savvy of us on here, is there any chance Hister can be can hosted on something like Pikapods? https://www.pikapods.com/
This is a great suggestion, thanks! I'll definitely add it to the list of candidates. My plan is to do a vote on our social platforms if we have a few decent candidates.
Would like:
* Local web page interface or even browser UI element (since extension needed anyway)
* Ability to add notes to history
* Flag if bookmarked, allow filtering "bookmarks only"
* Keep old versions of pages
* Human-readable text diff vs current live page
Thanks so much for creating this. Installed last time it was posted and have been loving it. The MCP server and extensions and userscripts are great QOL additions, as well. Always wondered if something was out there like this and you answered my prayers! New name suggestion: MisterHistory
What does Hister do differently? Search seems like a major differentiator, I'm wondering if leveraging the existing archivebox project for archival and implementing good search on top would be more efficient
The main difference I see is Hister focuses on creating an active knowledge base and finding information quickly, while ArchiveBox focuses on preserving web content for the long term.
It feels like I'm the only person using this but I'd like to throw another potential bookmark manager integration into the ring, cherry https://github.com/haishanh/cherry
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]
Webpages used to have meta keyword tags until spammers hijacked them for irrelevant keywords.
I think browsers can play a part in building a local search index for URLs based on those keywords the page declares and cross verify/accept only those that are in prominently visible content, or may be delegate to an external engine(like LLMs) via an extension etc. This is particularly useful for cases where full text indexing is not feasible or desirable.
I doubt Google will ever add such feature in chrome though.
Meta keyword tags have always sucked even without malice. Because they're invisible, authors frequently forget to update them, copying <head> boilerplate between documents.
I feel like this could be useful for my Karpathy-style LLM Wiki, but then again I think, in this day and age most of what I'm reading about is outdated in a few weeks. Not only are the tools/methods coming and going, but the ones that stick around drastically change. It would probably turn into a dump of antiquated markdown that could cause confusion.
As far as the need for private search, well, I've already searched for or visited those pages, so...
Yeup, as I mentioned, it kind of feels like a Yak-shave....but it was fun building it, and gave me some experience with agentic coding and new technologies I don't normally work with. It's nice to dig into for some research.
The biggest win was the realization that both firefox and chrome maintain all the links you visit in a very queryable SQLite database. I've been poking at that for a lot of custom tools, like WHAT JIRA tickets am I paying attention to this week, etc....
I vibed most of it (and though I like the code that was output, I coached it with some custom skills). If I were to share it out, I'd probably clean up some of the tools to make their interfaces smaller and cleaner. And make the docs a lot simpler. I'd probably also create some form of dashboard so you can see what's happening (all the docs scraped and saved), etc.
EDIT: it's also the type of thing that feels very personally customized for my needs. I encourage you to build something similar on the idea. Much like how Karpathy Wiki was suggestive and not a runtime to just use...
I guess he meant it in a "look, I made a cool thing that is useful to me, but don't go throwing away your current organizational method just yet nor leave it open to the internet" way.
> have it up on GitHub, but I don't think anyone should use my implementation.
ditto, it's an experiment in near-vibe coding, which also uses Typesense for queries using BM-25 & RAG with fusion. I have the web search/fetch/crawl features persisting raw intermediate values (api responses, search result lists) because I might re-use them one day... at least good for auditability if I need to
related, it is using Hister author's prior project SearXNG as one of the search providers
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.
Building from source is nowadays writing one sentence in a chat box. Your idea of extra work is either unbelievably lazy or perhaps outdated by a few years.
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.
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.
Been running hister on my work machine for a month or two now. It's one of those things I don't look at until I need to, but when I do need it, it solves the dreaded hunting through the last month of browser history.
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 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.
Is all your browsing history already with chatgpt or something?
This has an MCP server specifically so a workflow like that would work for you. This is just made to gold the data, and I'm a human accessible way should your AI fail you
No I don't share anything with chatgpt. But I do have a $20 subscription, if it matters. I feel It's just capable enough to find what I want from my usually vague and inaccurate description.
Nothing about this depends on the provider, you could spin up a local Qwen and give it a search tool like SearXNG or something. At this point local models are more than good enough for simple tasks like that. Using ChatGPT is just (usually) faster and simpler
There should be no real vendor lock in in my opinion. You can ask the same question with pi + qwen (or any harness + good enough model) with internet access and it will work. Chatgpt is just one option came in handy.
> Your own search engine — Hister is a private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep.
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.
I am happy to see the idea of history search more. I am on my 3rd version of my own. the use of local LLMs has made it easier to support features like weekly summarized and recipe extraction.
Not a bad idea, and I used to save lots of web pages as PDFs in the distant past, but I've noticed that a large percentage of sites will not print out correctly as a PDF these days. I see myriad problems these days: the page is truncated on the right (no matter how much you zoom out), or all pages come out blank after the first page, or the PDF gets rendered as an image (taking many megabytes per page) rather than as text, or the outer frame prints but inner frames with the actual content are missing.
The more "modern" the site, the worse it is. Surprisingly, government websites often print correctly since they've done the least amount of work to make the site modern looking.
Ooh, very nice! I have my own tool I’ve been using for this [https://github.com/bradrn/full-history-search/], and it’s incredibly useful, but it’s also pretty primitive. This one looks a lot nicer.
I've been using this since the last time it came up on here. I don't have it index every page I visit, I use the browser plugin to tell it to index specific ones. It is useful for sure, but I think it will really shine once I've been using it long enough for it to build up a bigger index of things that are old enough that I've actually forgotten about them.
It's really great you've done all that work for importing from other apps - I use Karakeep and at first didnt know how much redundancy I have between the two, but now I am going to try this since I have so much of it already setup.
Thanks, that looks interesting, I will test it out and see if it continuously sync or must be manually imported from time to time, or if it can replaces linkwarden entirely. My linkwarden instance also saves as a pdf not just html and bookmarks are in GB in size, if hister does it more efficiently it’s even better.
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!
Hi asciimoo, seems like this is the second time Hister is hitting the HN front page in a month, so congrats on the success!
Question for you: For the less tech savvy of us on here, is there any chance Hister can be can hosted on something like Pikapods? https://www.pikapods.com/
Hi @asciimoo , related to a name suggestion, how about something like...
* chronilog.org ...as in, a log of one's chronicles.
* And if you will include this into KDE, then can use a 'k' instead, such as kronilog.org :-)
Both seem to be available. ;-)
This is a great suggestion, thanks! I'll definitely add it to the list of candidates. My plan is to do a vote on our social platforms if we have a few decent candidates.
Would like: * Local web page interface or even browser UI element (since extension needed anyway) * Ability to add notes to history * Flag if bookmarked, allow filtering "bookmarks only" * Keep old versions of pages * Human-readable text diff vs current live page
Thanks so much for creating this. Installed last time it was posted and have been loving it. The MCP server and extensions and userscripts are great QOL additions, as well. Always wondered if something was out there like this and you answered my prayers! New name suggestion: MisterHistory
"No mandatory cloud - A complete personal setup can run on one local machine."
How does it sync via several computers?
Tailscale is one option
Are you aware of ArchiveBox?
https://archivebox.io/
What does Hister do differently? Search seems like a major differentiator, I'm wondering if leveraging the existing archivebox project for archival and implementing good search on top would be more efficient
The main difference I see is Hister focuses on creating an active knowledge base and finding information quickly, while ArchiveBox focuses on preserving web content for the long term.
Histerekishi / Histereki - れきし/歴史 means history in Japanese. reki れき/歴 is a suffix which means (history of)
Histeri
MyHister(i)
Hyster(y)
Also, I have been using your app for two months now. I have only had to rely on it a few times, but each time I did it worked beautifully. Thank you.
It feels like I'm the only person using this but I'd like to throw another potential bookmark manager integration into the ring, cherry https://github.com/haishanh/cherry
Not even a readme?
What about "searchy.me"?
Does it work accross multiple computers? Ideally the service runs on a linux box on my tailnet, and my windows and mac systems share the same server.
Edit: I RTFD - and it seems yes.
Sure, as long as you (and the browser extension) can reach the server, it can be used from as many machines as you want even in a multi-user setup.
"Optional global or personal access token used to authenticate extension requests."
Looks like you can even set authentication up so you can run it at home but connect while you're away too...
is this like a pihole? is there a design difference you are going for here?
"It looks like our name conflicts with a registered trademark in the US. "
So? Where are you based? For what class was the trademark filed? When was it filed?
I doubt that he has any leverage, but I don't know the background.
Thanks for making Hister, I've been using it for a few days (~7k docs) and I'm impressed so far.
"hister 2: histlectric histerloo"
OMG, you win!!! :-D
Thanks so much for this, I'm using it all the time. I self host a few things, but I'm using this the most.
histro.org is available.
Unfortunately, it is still considered too similar from a legal standpoint.
In that case, clipshot.org is also available.
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...
Webpages used to have meta keyword tags until spammers hijacked them for irrelevant keywords.
I think browsers can play a part in building a local search index for URLs based on those keywords the page declares and cross verify/accept only those that are in prominently visible content, or may be delegate to an external engine(like LLMs) via an extension etc. This is particularly useful for cases where full text indexing is not feasible or desirable.
I doubt Google will ever add such feature in chrome though.
Meta keyword tags have always sucked even without malice. Because they're invisible, authors frequently forget to update them, copying <head> boilerplate between documents.
I feel like this could be useful for my Karpathy-style LLM Wiki, but then again I think, in this day and age most of what I'm reading about is outdated in a few weeks. Not only are the tools/methods coming and going, but the ones that stick around drastically change. It would probably turn into a dump of antiquated markdown that could cause confusion.
As far as the need for private search, well, I've already searched for or visited those pages, so...
Yeup, as I mentioned, it kind of feels like a Yak-shave....but it was fun building it, and gave me some experience with agentic coding and new technologies I don't normally work with. It's nice to dig into for some research.
The biggest win was the realization that both firefox and chrome maintain all the links you visit in a very queryable SQLite database. I've been poking at that for a lot of custom tools, like WHAT JIRA tickets am I paying attention to this week, etc....
Why don't you think people should use your implementation? Just curious
I vibed most of it (and though I like the code that was output, I coached it with some custom skills). If I were to share it out, I'd probably clean up some of the tools to make their interfaces smaller and cleaner. And make the docs a lot simpler. I'd probably also create some form of dashboard so you can see what's happening (all the docs scraped and saved), etc.
EDIT: it's also the type of thing that feels very personally customized for my needs. I encourage you to build something similar on the idea. Much like how Karpathy Wiki was suggestive and not a runtime to just use...
I guess he meant it in a "look, I made a cool thing that is useful to me, but don't go throwing away your current organizational method just yet nor leave it open to the internet" way.
> have it up on GitHub, but I don't think anyone should use my implementation.
ditto, it's an experiment in near-vibe coding, which also uses Typesense for queries using BM-25 & RAG with fusion. I have the web search/fetch/crawl features persisting raw intermediate values (api responses, search result lists) because I might re-use them one day... at least good for auditability if I need to
related, it is using Hister author's prior project SearXNG as one of the search providers
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.
Clone the repo and ask your llm of choice to audit any security risks
And then build from source. And make sure it doesn't auto-update so no new malware gets in. This is my idea of a lot of extra work.
Building from source is nowadays writing one sentence in a chat box. Your idea of extra work is either unbelievably lazy or perhaps outdated by a few years.
After that I run them in containers, no network access, ro filesystem.
good luck auditing all transitive dependencies
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.
I remember this as well. I hadn't noticed it was gone until just now, but you're right.
Edit: Found it. Thanks Claude.
https://github.com/ssnangua/google-chrome-comic-hd/blob/main...
https://dfir.blog/history-index-files-removed-from-chrome-v3...
There was also Google Desktop Search for several years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop
> I think due to technical constraints.
I think due to shareholders wanting new sportcars. The offline pages don't show Google Ads.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=342916
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
The default interface is web based: https://demo.hister.org/
Notes are not supported yet, only labels. But it is a useful addition, added to my TODO.
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.
Been running hister on my work machine for a month or two now. It's one of those things I don't look at until I need to, but when I do need it, it solves the dreaded hunting through the last month of browser history.
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 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.
Is all your browsing history already with chatgpt or something?
This has an MCP server specifically so a workflow like that would work for you. This is just made to gold the data, and I'm a human accessible way should your AI fail you
No I don't share anything with chatgpt. But I do have a $20 subscription, if it matters. I feel It's just capable enough to find what I want from my usually vague and inaccurate description.
And now you are even more dependent on OpenAI...
You didn't solve the problem, you are just trading pain points.
Nothing about this depends on the provider, you could spin up a local Qwen and give it a search tool like SearXNG or something. At this point local models are more than good enough for simple tasks like that. Using ChatGPT is just (usually) faster and simpler
There should be no real vendor lock in in my opinion. You can ask the same question with pi + qwen (or any harness + good enough model) with internet access and it will work. Chatgpt is just one option came in handy.
"Goddammit, I'm wholly dependent on Merriam-Webster, what ever am I going to do".
Interesting, I actually very recently built a similar project [1]. I was unaware of this...If I were I probably wouldn't have bothered!
[1] https://git.brucewillis.sexy/~tombert/fs_index I promise, safe for work, despite the URL.
I was fascinated by hister initially, but now I'm fixated on your URL.
Will definitely be giving this a try. The marketing website looks good. Did you have an LLM do the design?
> Your own search engine — Hister is a private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep.
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.
A recent discussion about this tool
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49351802
I am happy to see the idea of history search more. I am on my 3rd version of my own. the use of local LLMs has made it easier to support features like weekly summarized and recipe extraction.
I like the search ui. my projects become functional but never polished. https://github.com/sbeckeriv/memoir
I attain this without involving an untrustworthy third party, with one simple trick: Print to PDF.
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.
Not a bad idea, and I used to save lots of web pages as PDFs in the distant past, but I've noticed that a large percentage of sites will not print out correctly as a PDF these days. I see myriad problems these days: the page is truncated on the right (no matter how much you zoom out), or all pages come out blank after the first page, or the PDF gets rendered as an image (taking many megabytes per page) rather than as text, or the outer frame prints but inner frames with the actual content are missing.
The more "modern" the site, the worse it is. Surprisingly, government websites often print correctly since they've done the least amount of work to make the site modern looking.
Very true.
Even full page screenshot doesn’t always capture the non visible part of the page (below the viewport).
Except search. I want search. Going to try this project.
Ooh, very nice! I have my own tool I’ve been using for this [https://github.com/bradrn/full-history-search/], and it’s incredibly useful, but it’s also pretty primitive. This one looks a lot nicer.
I've been using this since the last time it came up on here. I don't have it index every page I visit, I use the browser plugin to tell it to index specific ones. It is useful for sure, but I think it will really shine once I've been using it long enough for it to build up a bigger index of things that are old enough that I've actually forgotten about them.
first line of the open-source readme: ~download the binary for windows~ -- paved with good intentions?
I've been trying this out the past few weeks. I was literally just in there searching for a link 5 minutes ago.
It's badly needed, and so far it's working well for me.
Bonus point for having an IRC channel for community forum.
This is really cool. I like the idea of combining it with a offline Wikipedia cache.
Can you add viewed tweets?
Yes: https://hister.org/posts/how-hister-makes-the-social-web-sea...
It's really great you've done all that work for importing from other apps - I use Karakeep and at first didnt know how much redundancy I have between the two, but now I am going to try this since I have so much of it already setup.
Saw on Discord that they have to change their name, since https://histre.com sent them a letter.
Had a double take as initially read it as Hitler...
Integrate it with linkwarden so it searches the bookmarked pages.
It does that already. https://hister.org/docs/import#importing-from-linkwarden
Thanks, that looks interesting, I will test it out and see if it continuously sync or must be manually imported from time to time, or if it can replaces linkwarden entirely. My linkwarden instance also saves as a pdf not just html and bookmarks are in GB in size, if hister does it more efficiently it’s even better.
Imagine the security vulnerabilities
I thought that said Hitler at first.