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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. scoot · · focus · HN ↗
      Hyster (not Hister as far as I can tell) is a registered trademark in the US. Regardless:

      &quot;The HYSTER trademark is filed in the category of Education and Entertainment Services&quot; [0], so you can safely ignore any demands to rename, as it doesn&#x27;t conflict. Embarrassing for them that their lawyers don&#x27;t understand even the basics of trademark law.

      Edit to clarify as some folks here are as confused as sHyster&#x27;s lawyers: Trademarks are not exclusive, they&#x27;re restricted to a category or categories. You can be Apple in the category of computers, but not in music if there&#x27;s already an Apple in that category (unless you have $500M to spare [2]).

        [0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trademarkia.com&#x2F;hyster-77843354
  [1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tmsearch.uspto.gov&#x2F; for a more authoritative source than [0], but it doesn&#x27;t allow deep linking
  [2] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
      1. scoot · · focus · HN ↗
        &gt; Embarrassing for them that their lawyers don&#x27;t understand even the basics of trademark law

        Or more likely do, but hope that you don&#x27;t...

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