Hister | Your Own Search Engine
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Your Own<br>Search Engine<br>Hister turns the pages you visit and the files you keep into a private, full content search<br>index that you control.<br>svg]:px-3 font-space brutal-press-lg border-brutal-border h-auto justify-center rounded-none border-[3px] bg-[#59598f] px-8 py-4 text-[15px] font-bold tracking-[1.3px] text-white uppercase no-underline" href="/docs/quickstart">Get started svg]:px-3 bg-brutal-card font-space brutal-press-lg border-brutal-border h-auto justify-center rounded-none border-[3px] px-8 py-4 text-[15px] font-bold tracking-[1.3px] text-[var(--text-primary)] uppercase no-underline hover:bg-[var(--text-primary)] hover:text-white" href="https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hister/cciilamhchpmbdnniabclekddabkifhb" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Download extension<br>Free software on GitHub<br>Hister<br>1,924 pages indexed<br>privacy notes I read last month<br>6 results in your index 0.04 sec
The ultimate way to protect digital privacy<br>hister.org/posts
Keep useful pages close, searchable, and under your control...
privacy-notes.md<br>~/documents/notes
A private index makes the things you already found useful again.
Stored preview<br>Search without retracing your steps<br>Open a clean preview, see where it came from, and get back to the exact idea you<br>remembered.<br>Full content saved Source stays visible Searchable again
Free software<br>AGPLv3
Self hosted<br>Run it on your own machine or server
Privacy focused<br>No telemetry, no external requests
Preserve Knowledge.<br>Find It Again.<br>Hister stores extracted document content with the search index and displays it as a readable<br>preview alongside search results.<br>svg]:px-3 font-space brutal-press-lg border-brutal-border h-auto justify-center rounded-none border-[3px] bg-[var(--text-primary)] px-8 py-4 text-[15px] font-bold tracking-[1.3px] text-white uppercase no-underline" href="https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/releases/latest" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Download Hister svg]:px-3 bg-brutal-card font-space brutal-press-lg border-brutal-border h-auto justify-center rounded-none border-[3px] px-8 py-4 text-[15px] font-bold tracking-[1.3px] text-[var(--text-primary)] uppercase no-underline hover:bg-[var(--text-primary)] hover:text-white" href="https://demo.hister.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Try the live demo
Search the content you chose to index<br>Look beyond bookmarks and filenames. Hister indexes the full content of the pages and<br>files you choose, then keeps that searchable knowledge on a server you control.
Search the actual content<br>Look beyond titles and URLs to the words inside every indexed document.
Narrow with precision<br>Use fields, phrases, wildcards, negation, priorities, and your own aliases.
Read it in context<br>Open a clean stored preview beside the results without losing your search.
Explore the query language
Collect
Save newly visited pages with the browser extension, watch local folders, import your history, or crawl a site.<br>Visited pages<br>Local files
Index
Hister extracts the parts that matter and indexes their full text on the server you choose.<br>Full text<br>Stored context
Find
Search from the web, terminal, command line, or let an AI assistant retrieve it through MCP.<br>Web and terminal<br>MCP assistants
The simple loop<br>Browser extensions can index pages as they are visited. File watchers, history imports, and<br>crawlers add other sources to the same index.
Why Hister<br>Preserve Knowledge.<br>Keep Control.<br>The index, stored page content, and rules remain on the Hister server you configure. The<br>server has no telemetry and does not require a cloud service.<br>Read the privacy model
No telemetry<br>The server does not phone home or report what you search.
No mandatory cloud<br>A complete personal setup can run on one local machine.
Your chosen server<br>Clients send indexed content only to the Hister server you configure.
Auditable software<br>The source is public and licensed as free software under AGPLv3.
Your private search path
Your sources<br>Pages, files, and history you choose
Your Hister server<br>Extraction, rules, and searchable index
Your answers<br>Results, previews, and integrations
Optional semantic search sends text to the embeddings endpoint you configure. Browser<br>extensions may retrieve page favicons. You choose whether and where these connections run.
Index automatically
Browser extensions can index visited pages automatically. File watching, history imports, and the crawler add other sources.<br>Browser extensions<br>Local file watching<br>History import<br>Website crawler
Search precisely
Full text search supports field filters, quoted phrases, wildcards, negation, date ranges, and query aliases.<br>Field filters<br>Quoted phrases<br>Wildcards and negation<br>Query aliases
Extract content
Content extractors handle structured data from supported formats and websites. Semantic search is optional.<br>Content extractors<br>Semantic search<br>Language aware indexes<br>Readable previews
Apply index...