Hi everyone,
I am the original author of Searx. I started Hister with a similar motivation: reducing our dependence on external search engines while keeping searches and personal data under our control.
Searx is a metasearch engine that forwards queries to other search providers. Hister takes a different approach. It builds a private full text index from content you choose, then searches that index entirely on your own infrastructure.
Hister can automatically index pages through its Firefox and Chrome extensions. It can also watch local directories, import browser history and bookmarks, index individual URLs, and crawl complete documentation sites.
The feature I find most useful is offline previews. Hister stores the readable content and HTML of indexed pages locally. You can open a result in a clean and sanitized preview beside the search results without visiting the original website again.
Some other features:
- Full text search across web pages, PDFs, docx files, Markdown, OrgMode and text files
- Phrase searches, field filters, date filters, wildcards, negation, aliases, labels, facets, and result priorities
- Optional semantic search using an embeddings endpoint you configure
- Persistent website crawls
- Imports from browser history, Linkwarden, Karakeep, Shaarli, Wallabag, and Linkding
- Web, terminal, command line, HTTP API, and MCP interfaces
- SQLite and PostgreSQL support, plus optional multiple user hosting
Hister cannot replace a global search engine (yet) for subjects you have never encountered because it only searches what you have indexed. My workflow is to search Hister first, then use its shortcut to fall back to traditional search when I need broader web results.
The project is free software under the AGPLv3+ license. It can be installed as a standalone binary or with Docker.
Project: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister
Website and documentation: https://hister.org/
Small read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/
I’d appreciate feedback, questions, and suggestions as well as joining our growing community.
AI disclosure: AI assisted contributions are not strictly prohibited, but all contributions should be made by humans. More details: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#ai-policy
This is my final reply in this thread. The developer has said their piece, and I have said mine. Now you’ve waded in - so let me set the record straight.
I am a developer. I had genuine interest in this project. I read the Hister documentation and inspected parts of the repository because the documentation did not clearly answer several basic questions I had:
How SQLite, Bleve, and stored HTML relate.
Whether TTL or storage quotas exist.
How browser-history deletion affects stored data.
How previews differ from a real web archive.
What multi-user isolation actually covers.
Yes, I used AI to assemble a plain-language summary and labelled it accordingly. Not everyone keeps the Hister codebase in their head, not everyone talks in code review and if I had these questions, I’m willing to bet others did too. The AI wrote for a lay audience because I didn’t ask it to do QA, I asked it to ELI-5.
The summary contained errors. Fine. That’s AI for you. However, if neither I nor the AI could find clear answers after cloning the repo, that supports my point about opacity.
At no point did I request a line-by-line audit. “Points 2 and 5 are wrong” would have answered the question.
Declining would also have been reasonable. Hell, side stepping it would have been fine too. Instead the dev decided to note the inaccuracies and rudely brush them off.
Both you and the dev seem to be under the impression !selfhosted is a one way distribution channel.
The developer came here, invited questions, then turned the raw prawn when questions arrived.
I didn’t go to their their Github. I didn’t abuse them. I genuinely wanted to know more about their project and share it, perhaps even work to help improve it.
They - and now you, ostensibly a happy supporter of Hister - came here.
Your claims about my effort and intent are assumptions followed by personal abuse.
Try and walk a mile in someone else’s shoes before calling them low effort and shitty next time.