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asciimoo
hister
Go2026–2026
asciimoo / hister

hister

Your own search engine

Web DevelopmentSecurity & PrivacyAI & Machine LearningSearch & Information Retrieval
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
14Distinct people
30Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
6.3KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Your own search engine

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month30 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2026-02-05 16:22:10 UTC to 2026-10-26 09:43:06 UTC.

02462026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 2 submissions, 0 commentsFeb 20262026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 commentsJun 20262026-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 2 submissions, 5 comments2026-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments2026-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2026-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 commentsOct 2026

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Feb 20262026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC220
Mar 20262026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Apr 20262026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC110
May 20262026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC606
Jun 20262026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-07-01 00:00:00 UTC202
Jul 20262026-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-08-01 00:00:00 UTC725
Aug 20262026-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-09-01 00:00:00 UTC615
Sep 20262026-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-10-01 00:00:00 UTC211
Oct 20262026-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-11-01 00:00:00 UTC303

What Hacker News says

30 sources
elashri·Oct 26, 2026
I'm probably in the minority but I can't stand having more than 10 tabs and I start have the urge to finish the task that I'm focused on to just close as many tabs as possible. So I really read the people talking about 100s of tabs and when I see a colleague having them, I feel that my cognitive ability to deal with that is not there. I understand that people would like to keep things and that bookmarks sucks, but I would suggest for those to explore Hister [1] and Karakeep [2]. It is much useful that I don't worry about losing stuff now. [1] https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/ [2] https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep
In Overgrown, when plants invade your abandoned tabs
wmchen·Aug 22, 2026
Thank you so much for building this! It's a really awesome piece of work and I'm grateful for your work. I'd love to sponsor you on Github in the near future. The only thing that I think would be interesting to see is native support for crawling via a sitemap.xml instead of recursively. I worked around this by implementing a basic scraper that fetched pages exclusively from the sitemap.xml to add into Hister. I think you're already aware of this, but I also experienced some data loss during the import because I was running a concurrent reindex. I clocked it pretty quickly so I didn't think too much of it. [1] [1] "TODO store new documents in both indexes while running reindex to guarantee not losing any data." @ https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/blob/master/server/indexe...
In Hister – A private, full content search index that you control
asciimoo·Aug 22, 2026
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. Project page: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister Tiny read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/
In Hister – A private, full content search index that you control
asciimoo·Aug 3, 2026
Hi everyone, I am the original author of Searx. I'm working on a new search project, 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 sanitiz
Read the rest
ed 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 like Searx 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/ --- Btw, this rust implementation looks clean at first glance. The engine interface is simple enough to allow rapid engine development - which is probably the most important factor in a metasearch project.
In SearXNG in Rust

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