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

741 points · 202 comments · bookofjoe

  1. asciimoo · · focus · HN ↗
    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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hister.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hister.org&#x2F;

    Tiny read-only demo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demo.hister.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demo.hister.org&#x2F;

    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!

    1. corndoge · · focus · HN ↗
      Are you aware of ArchiveBox?

      <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archivebox.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archivebox.io&#x2F;

      What does Hister do differently? Search seems like a major differentiator, I&#x27;m wondering if leveraging the existing archivebox project for archival and implementing good search on top would be more efficient

      1. asciimoo · · focus · HN ↗
        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.
        1. corndoge · · focus · HN ↗
          Thanks for answering. Do you think these dovetail? Both archive everything you browse, so that&#x27;s common functionality that could be factored out. I only want one archive, having two separate archives because one focuses on search and the other on long term archival is inefficient. What do you do for long term archival - or do you not have this use case?
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