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: https://hister.org/
Tiny read-only demo: 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!
The thing I most struggle with in this domain is recalling information from videos. I watch/listen to a lot of hour+ lectures and I rely on this website deeply:
https://filmot.com/
It lets you search YouTube transcripts. If you could somehow integrate video transcripts into this tool, I would be extremely interested in trying it out
We have a `yt-dlp` based extractor that can fetch the subtitles/transcripts from the sites `yt-dlp` supports: https://hister.org/docs/extractors#ytdlp
Been using hister for a number of weeks now; i'm coming across sites whose content would be better handled with a custom extractor; but it looks like extractors need to be bundled into the build in order to work? Is that correct?
Put another way, i can't write an extractor for Reuters and then point a config to it from my current hister binary?
Hi asciimoo, seems like this is the second time Hister is hitting the HN front page in a month, so congrats on the success!
Question for you: For the less tech savvy of us on here, is there any chance Hister can be can hosted on something like Pikapods? https://www.pikapods.com/
Yes, that's something I'd like to support. The main missing piece for a user-friendly hosting option such as PikaPods is a configuration UI. At the moment, customizing Hister requires editing a configuration file, which isn't practical for this kind of hosted service.
Appreciate the response! I'll be eagerly following Hister's progress. For now, I've settled on a mix of Instapaper and using SingleFile uploads to Dropbox.
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My suggestion is Lookdown. Kind of a play on words reminiscent of Markup/Markdown --> Lookup/Lookdown. But also a lookdown is a distinctive looking fish with a cute concave profile so you've got an instant mascot.
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.
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
I've never experienced/heard similar behavior. Could you open a GitHub issue or join our Discord/IRC to identify the root cause?
Hi @asciimoo , related to a name suggestion, how about something like...
* chronilog.org ...as in, a log of one's chronicles.
* And if you will include this into KDE, then can use a 'k' instead, such as kronilog.org :-)
Both seem to be available. ;-)
This is a great suggestion, thanks! I'll definitely add it to the list of candidates. My plan is to do a vote on our social platforms if we have a few decent candidates.
Unless you are really strapped for cash, register all the candidates before you start that voting.
Genuinely curious, how could one fight pre-emptive domain squatters once any candidate is publicly suggested?
When I have suggested names in other situations like this in the past, I spent the ~$10 to get the domain, and offered the transfer the free. Of course, not everyone would do this.
What about Krionicle? References Chronological Chronicle, cryo- (freezing knowledge for later use), and a robotic toy from 2001
On HN does it capture both the HN post page and the target page?
E.g.: for this submission I would want both https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49743097 and https://github.com/asciimoo/hister captured.
The extension captures the content of the opened tabs, it does not create new requests. If you open both, it captures both.
You may be the first "search engine" capable of indexing instagram and other closed sites.
Exactly, this is the biggest advantage of the extension. It is fully invisible for the websites, so no captcha, anti-bot protection, no authentication issues, every common bottleneck of a classic crawler is solved by the browser/user.
Oh, I haven't considered the possibility of indexing things like Instagram or Discord with this. I am now much more interested than before
Thanks so much for creating this. Installed last time it was posted and have been loving it. The MCP server and extensions and userscripts are great QOL additions, as well. Always wondered if something was out there like this and you answered my prayers! New name suggestion: MisterHistory
Are you aware of ArchiveBox?
https://archivebox.io/
What does Hister do differently? Search seems like a major differentiator, I'm wondering if leveraging the existing archivebox project for archival and implementing good search on top would be more efficient
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.
Thanks for answering. Do you think these dovetail? Both archive everything you browse, so that'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?
Would like: * Local web page interface or even browser UI element (since extension needed anyway) * Ability to add notes to history * Flag if bookmarked, allow filtering "bookmarks only" * Keep old versions of pages * Human-readable text diff vs current live page
I will definitely try this in my home-lab!
And for the name, what about "Historex" (although already taken as well) o "Histearch", mesh-up of "history" and "search"?
Whatever you do, try not to chose a name which collides with nostrodamus' predictions about .. (ok, he actually used "Hister" to refer to the Danube it seems, but popular legend has another take which is .. unfortunate)
"No mandatory cloud - A complete personal setup can run on one local machine."
How does it sync via several computers?
Tailscale is one option
I built something similar at the start of the year, using tailscale for auth (multi user on my tailnet/home network) and for access wherever I was, whether at home or on the road (all compute/storage was on my Mac mini.) Worked a treat.
Histerekishi / Histereki - れきし/歴史 means history in Japanese. reki れき/歴 is a suffix which means (history of)
Histeri
MyHister(i)
Hyster(y)
Also, I have been using your app for two months now. I have only had to rely on it a few times, but each time I did it worked beautifully. Thank you.
It feels like I'm the only person using this but I'd like to throw another potential bookmark manager integration into the ring, cherry https://github.com/haishanh/cherry
Not even a readme?
Never even noticed that was missing and it's probably why nobody else uses it. I took it from https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/xyepiu/cherry_a... and https://cherry.haishan.me/ and just worked from the Dockerfile
Regarding the name, how about Ascimo or Askimo? :)
Does it work accross multiple computers? Ideally the service runs on a linux box on my tailnet, and my windows and mac systems share the same server.
Edit: I RTFD - and it seems yes.
Sure, as long as you (and the browser extension) can reach the server, it can be used from as many machines as you want even in a multi-user setup.
"Optional global or personal access token used to authenticate extension requests."
Looks like you can even set authentication up so you can run it at home but connect while you're away too...
What about "searchy.me"?
is this like a pihole? is there a design difference you are going for here?
May I suggest Yahoox!
Thanks for making Hister, I've been using it for a few days (~7k docs) and I'm impressed so far.
"hister 2: histlectric histerloo"
OMG, you win!!! :-D
hisect (history and bisect)
Seekfold (seek and manifold)
Seekdex (seek and index)
histsearch
Srchr
"It looks like our name conflicts with a registered trademark in the US. "
So? Where are you based? For what class was the trademark filed? When was it filed?
I doubt that he has any leverage, but I don't know the background.
Histeria
I gather rss feeds from the websites I visit and it's hard to express how interesting they are. The gut says it borderlines some random collection but that couldn't be more wrong. I also enjoyed YaCy, that project should have a good amount of ideas for you. I kinda end up assigning more and more bandwidth until it gets in the way and I forget to enable it again. The turtle button on some torrent clients is a good invention.
Thanks so much for this, I'm using it all the time. I self host a few things, but I'm using this the most.
histro.org is available.
Unfortunately, it is still considered too similar from a legal standpoint.
I doubt it. Trademark “infringement “ only happens when the two parties compete in the same space. I think if the other party is the music party game, you’re pretty much in the clear. They may still sue you and lose unless you cave.
In that case, clipshot.org is also available.
historea.org is available.
It sounds like history, storage and ethereal at the same time.
that exactly how the Greek word sounds :)
ιστορία, if you wanna copy paste.
and yes, the English word comes from the Greek word!
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