Hister

Hister - Your Own Search Engine

Your Own<br>Search Engine<br>Full-text search across your files, visited sites and beyond.<br>Free Software<br>Self Hosted<br>Privacy First

Preserve Knowledge

Features<br>Automatic save of visited websites<br>The browser extension silently captures and indexes every page you visit. Your entire browsing history becomes searchable without any manual effort.

Full-text indexing<br>Index the actual content of web pages and local files, not just titles and URLs. Find any document by the words it contains.

Semantic search<br>Find content by meaning, not just keywords. Powered by optional AI embeddings for context-aware, intent-driven results.

Advanced querying<br>Precision search with field filters, boolean operators, phrase matching, wildcards, and personal query aliases for faster recall.

Result preview<br>Open a clean, reader-friendly offline preview of any indexed page directly inside Hister, no internet connection required.

Crawler with multiple backends<br>Index entire websites with the built-in BFS crawler. Supports a standard HTTP backend and real browser backends for JavaScript-heavy pages.

MCP server<br>Expose your personal search index as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) tool so AI assistants can query your browsing history directly.

Local file indexing<br>Index and search documents on your filesystem alongside web pages. Directories are watched for changes and the index updates automatically.

Browser history import<br>Bring your existing Firefox or Chrome browsing history into Hister.

History view<br>Browse and revisit your past search queries and indexed documents.

User handling<br>Create multiple accounts with separate indexes, individual API tokens, and per-user content rules. Ideal for shared or team deployments.

Privacy first<br>Fully self-hosted with no telemetry, no cloud sync, and no third-party services. Your data never leaves your own infrastructure.

Content rules<br>Define skip rules to block unwanted sites, priority rules to surface important domains, versioning rules to preserve document changes, and query aliases to create custom search shortcuts.

Browser extensions<br>Extensions available for Chrome and Firefox. Install once and indexing happens automatically in the background as you browse.

Terminal UI<br>A built-in interactive TUI lets you search directly from the terminal with full keyboard navigation, themes, and configurable hotkeys.

Multi-language support<br>Automatic language detection routes documents to dedicated per-language indexes, improving relevance and ranking across multilingual content.

Why Hister?<br>Keep your data private and local while enjoying powerful search capabilities.

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Web UI

Terminal UI

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