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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. MomsAVoxell · · focus · HN ↗
    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.

    1. nottorp · · focus · HN ↗
      Except search. I want search. Going to try this project.
      1. MomsAVoxell · · focus · HN ↗
        Yeah, about search:

            $ pdfgrep -r -i -n -H "your mom" ~/PDFArchives/
        
        Very effective, very fast, very private. Bonus points if the PDF filename itself is derived from a well formulated <title> tag, such that you can just use “ls” ..
        1. nottorp · · focus · HN ↗
          Yes, but that's a solution for the stuff you consciously save. While this is a solution for stuff you see but decide it was interesting weeks after you closed that tab and you only have a vague memory of what it was about.
          1. MomsAVoxell · · focus · HN ↗
            Well, I consciously save anything I’ve been interested in for at least 2 minutes, it’s a perfectly good way to filter interests - and the PDF solution safeguards those interests from being exploited by third parties.
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