Thread

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

741 points · 202 comments · bookofjoe

asciimoo · 1789667779 · 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://hister.org/" rel="nofollow">https://hister.org/
Tiny read-only demo: <a href="https://demo.hister.org/" rel="nofollow">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!
1. g_host · 1789696823 · focus · HN ↗
  I love Hister so much.
  I ran it for most of this year but encountered some problems with it I couldn't fix and thus have not had it hooked up to anything since June when I finally couldn't take it anymore.
  In short, I serve a good number of apps from an Nginx reverse proxy. Maybe 25% of them are exposed to the WWW while everything else is limited to the LAN but I still get valid TLS for all of it.
  Hister, though, kept breaking my whole reverse proxy and I could never figure out EXACTLY why so I could fix it. After running fine for a few days, it would hog the whole server and everything else proxied by Nginx would become unreachable. I tried tuning the config for it to no avail.
  One day when I'm less lazy, I'll probably hook it back up via it's LAN IP to every machine I've got again. I REALLY liked that I could log my browsing history from any machine anywhere in the world without a VPN and I was really disappointed when I had to disable its config in Nginx.
  I still use it a lot to go find stuff I flagged as important quickly.
  I'm curious if this is something you've heard of before, or if I've got a one off problem here.
  I even ported the config to a brand new VM with NGINX and still had the same problem.
  1. dwedge · 1789714004 · focus · HN ↗
    Are you sure it was the proxy and not JavaScript in your browser? I've seen similar behaviour from one particular website where using it in a certain way causes it to process a lot of data slowly and block the main thread. This somehow persisted across tabs, even if I closed all the tabs and tried again that site was still hanging until that process finished. But if I used incognito or another browser it would he responsive.
    It might be something similar if all of your sites are subdomains. Try incognito at the same time next time
    g_host · 1789751725 · focus · HN ↗
    That's a good call out but it is something I tested originally and ruled out.
    I've got some applications used daily by friends all over the world and the services would all become unavailable to them when this started happening. Only fix I found was restarting NGINX service and then it could happen again an hour later or 3 days later. Once I removed the proxy config for Hister from the service, the issue never happened again.
    I'll repro the issue and get the details intoa. Github Issue this weekend.
  2. asciimoo · 1789716227 · focus · HN ↗
    I've never experienced/heard similar behavior. Could you open a GitHub issue or join our Discord/IRC to identify the root cause?
    g_host · 1789751379 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, I should have some time this weekend to reproduce the problem and provide useful information for ya'll to look at...even if it's just to determine the problem is for me to fix and not a bug with Hister.

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