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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
Kind of related to this in that I built it to hoard knowledge from web pages I've visited along with implementing a Karpathy-style LLM Wiki, but the knowledge is collected automatically from sources I browse.
I have it up on GitHub, but I don't think anyone should use my implementation.
Loosely, what I built:
* On each of my machines I have a cron job running that looks at all my web browser history (usualy it's inspecting the brower's SQLlite across firefox and chrome). If it matches my rule list: hacker news stories, certain reddits, etc. it'll grab the page, convert to markdown and drop in my Obsidian Vault incoming.
* It has a whole de-duping architecture since I might open the same page on multiple machines. Uses the CloudFlare SQLITE D1 storage for tracking the processed links.
* it'll then trigger the LLM to do some Karpathy wiki style taxonomy assignment to the articles, organize them, create an index etc.
It's then available for my "bot" stuff to do writings for me.... I will probably write more about it at some point. I'm not certain it's totally useful and not just a yak-shave on hoarding knowledge.
Ai-drafted article on this [1]
Example AI-Drafted article based on some discussions the other day on Ollma vs LLama.cpp [2]
Webpages used to have meta keyword tags until spammers hijacked them for irrelevant keywords.
I think browsers can play a part in building a local search index for URLs based on those keywords the page declares and cross verify/accept only those that are in prominently visible content, or may be delegate to an external engine(like LLMs) via an extension etc. This is particularly useful for cases where full text indexing is not feasible or desirable.
I doubt Google will ever add such feature in chrome though.
Meta keyword tags have always sucked even without malice. Because they're invisible, authors frequently forget to update them, copying <head> boilerplate between documents.
I feel like this could be useful for my Karpathy-style LLM Wiki, but then again I think, in this day and age most of what I'm reading about is outdated in a few weeks. Not only are the tools/methods coming and going, but the ones that stick around drastically change. It would probably turn into a dump of antiquated markdown that could cause confusion.
As far as the need for private search, well, I've already searched for or visited those pages, so...
Yeup, as I mentioned, it kind of feels like a Yak-shave....but it was fun building it, and gave me some experience with agentic coding and new technologies I don't normally work with. It's nice to dig into for some research.
The biggest win was the realization that both firefox and chrome maintain all the links you visit in a very queryable SQLite database. I've been poking at that for a lot of custom tools, like WHAT JIRA tickets am I paying attention to this week, etc....
I vibed most of it (and though I like the code that was output, I coached it with some custom skills). If I were to share it out, I'd probably clean up some of the tools to make their interfaces smaller and cleaner. And make the docs a lot simpler. I'd probably also create some form of dashboard so you can see what's happening (all the docs scraped and saved), etc.
EDIT: it's also the type of thing that feels very personally customized for my needs. I encourage you to build something similar on the idea. Much like how Karpathy Wiki was suggestive and not a runtime to just use...
I guess he meant it in a "look, I made a cool thing that is useful to me, but don't go throwing away your current organizational method just yet nor leave it open to the internet" way.
I'd like to use it, but I'm hesitant to use anything that isn't a reviewed and approved package in my Linux distribution. Even if the chance is 1% that a program I download has malware or security problems that even the author doesn't know about (eg., due to libraries used), odds are that my system's going to be compromised if I run 50 such programs. This extends to browser add-ons, bookmarklets, and extensions too.
How do other people handle this dilemma?
Even solution I can think of involves are a great amount of extra work.
Building from source is nowadays writing one sentence in a chat box. Your idea of extra work is either unbelievably lazy or perhaps outdated by a few years.
Been running hister on my work machine for a month or two now. It's one of those things I don't look at until I need to, but when I do need it, it solves the dreaded hunting through the last month of browser history.
I also have it index my Obsidian notes, which is another little bonus for global search.
I did need to build up quite a few exclusion rules early on, but it's been hands off since.
Can I add NOTES about pages? This might be a good spot to do that...? Maybe the interface can be in a web page instead of terminal?
Before Google took off there was a vibrant ecosystem of FOSS dev around search, all different little aspects of it. Then after Google people stopped fiddling with search, search became "solved" or maybe "must be coded by the big boys". Shame.
I had the same problem for a very long time but it is largely solved now. I started to simply ask chatgpt "hey I read something about x, y month ago but can't find it now". There is a surprisingly high chance chatbot can just give the exact answer back to me, usually with extra interesting reading materials as a plus.
Is all your browsing history already with chatgpt or something?
This has an MCP server specifically so a workflow like that would work for you. This is just made to gold the data, and I'm a human accessible way should your AI fail you
No I don't share anything with chatgpt. But I do have a $20 subscription, if it matters. I feel It's just capable enough to find what I want from my usually vague and inaccurate description.
Nothing about this depends on the provider, you could spin up a local Qwen and give it a search tool like SearXNG or something. At this point local models are more than good enough for simple tasks like that. Using ChatGPT is just (usually) faster and simpler
There should be no real vendor lock in in my opinion. You can ask the same question with pi + qwen (or any harness + good enough model) with internet access and it will work. Chatgpt is just one option came in handy.
Not a bad idea, and I used to save lots of web pages as PDFs in the distant past, but I've noticed that a large percentage of sites will not print out correctly as a PDF these days. I see myriad problems these days: the page is truncated on the right (no matter how much you zoom out), or all pages come out blank after the first page, or the PDF gets rendered as an image (taking many megabytes per page) rather than as text, or the outer frame prints but inner frames with the actual content are missing.
The more "modern" the site, the worse it is. Surprisingly, government websites often print correctly since they've done the least amount of work to make the site modern looking.
I am happy to see the idea of history search more. I am on my 3rd version of my own. the use of local LLMs has made it easier to support features like weekly summarized and recipe extraction.
> Your own search engine — Hister is a private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep.
Is there any site/project that works as a fully customizable personal front-end to all other SERPs?
When I search for something, I always want a link to the best Wikipedia result. This should always be in the same place and have a giant icon/picture.
Then there could be easily clickable links to the SERP pages for Google, DDG, etc. for that query.
A big link to route it to your favorite LLM.
Seems like you could have a really useful "homepage" for all searches that sat in front of all the other sites. It could be local only and would not require indexing the web. Also wouldn't be a files search thing, as Hister appears to be.
Ooh, very nice! I have my own tool I’ve been using for this [https://github.com/bradrn/full-history-search/], and it’s incredibly useful, but it’s also pretty primitive. This one looks a lot nicer.
I've been using this since the last time it came up on here. I don't have it index every page I visit, I use the browser plugin to tell it to index specific ones. It is useful for sure, but I think it will really shine once I've been using it long enough for it to build up a bigger index of things that are old enough that I've actually forgotten about them.
It's really great you've done all that work for importing from other apps - I use Karakeep and at first didnt know how much redundancy I have between the two, but now I am going to try this since I have so much of it already setup.
Thanks, that looks interesting, I will test it out and see if it continuously sync or must be manually imported from time to time, or if it can replaces linkwarden entirely. My linkwarden instance also saves as a pdf not just html and bookmarks are in GB in size, if hister does it more efficiently it’s even better.
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!
How does it sync via several computers?
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.
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
Edit: I RTFD - and it seems yes.
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.
I have it up on GitHub, but I don't think anyone should use my implementation.
Loosely, what I built:
* On each of my machines I have a cron job running that looks at all my web browser history (usualy it's inspecting the brower's SQLlite across firefox and chrome). If it matches my rule list: hacker news stories, certain reddits, etc. it'll grab the page, convert to markdown and drop in my Obsidian Vault incoming.
* It has a whole de-duping architecture since I might open the same page on multiple machines. Uses the CloudFlare SQLITE D1 storage for tracking the processed links.
* it'll then trigger the LLM to do some Karpathy wiki style taxonomy assignment to the articles, organize them, create an index etc.
It's then available for my "bot" stuff to do writings for me.... I will probably write more about it at some point. I'm not certain it's totally useful and not just a yak-shave on hoarding knowledge.
Ai-drafted article on this [1]
Example AI-Drafted article based on some discussions the other day on Ollma vs LLama.cpp [2]
[1] https://taude.xyz/posts/how-archivore-turns-browsing-into-a-...
[2] https://taude.xyz/posts/skip-ollama-run-llama-cpp-directly-o...
I think browsers can play a part in building a local search index for URLs based on those keywords the page declares and cross verify/accept only those that are in prominently visible content, or may be delegate to an external engine(like LLMs) via an extension etc. This is particularly useful for cases where full text indexing is not feasible or desirable.
I doubt Google will ever add such feature in chrome though.
As far as the need for private search, well, I've already searched for or visited those pages, so...
The biggest win was the realization that both firefox and chrome maintain all the links you visit in a very queryable SQLite database. I've been poking at that for a lot of custom tools, like WHAT JIRA tickets am I paying attention to this week, etc....
EDIT: it's also the type of thing that feels very personally customized for my needs. I encourage you to build something similar on the idea. Much like how Karpathy Wiki was suggestive and not a runtime to just use...
How do other people handle this dilemma?
Even solution I can think of involves are a great amount of extra work.
I also have it index my Obsidian notes, which is another little bonus for global search.
I did need to build up quite a few exclusion rules early on, but it's been hands off since.
Nobody seems to remember it, even though it was a headline feature. Was removed in 2013, I think due to technical constraints.
Will definitely try this.
Edit: Found it. Thanks Claude.
https://github.com/ssnangua/google-chrome-comic-hd/blob/main...
https://dfir.blog/history-index-files-removed-from-chrome-v3...
I think due to shareholders wanting new sportcars. The offline pages don't show Google Ads.
Can I add NOTES about pages? This might be a good spot to do that...? Maybe the interface can be in a web page instead of terminal?
Before Google took off there was a vibrant ecosystem of FOSS dev around search, all different little aspects of it. Then after Google people stopped fiddling with search, search became "solved" or maybe "must be coded by the big boys". Shame.
Thank you for this, looooong time coming
Notes are not supported yet, only labels. But it is a useful addition, added to my TODO.
This has an MCP server specifically so a workflow like that would work for you. This is just made to gold the data, and I'm a human accessible way should your AI fail you
You didn't solve the problem, you are just trading pain points.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49351802
Every single web page I’ve found interesting, since the advent of the Web, I have printed to PDF and stored locally for my own personal reference.
Something like 80,000+ files - my own copy of my own Internet - indexable, searchable.
Available offline. Something to read when I am far out to sea.
There is no need to involve third parties in your Internet history - no matter how trustworthy they seem to want to appear.
Print to PDF, and you’ve got everything you need, safe and sound.
The more "modern" the site, the worse it is. Surprisingly, government websites often print correctly since they've done the least amount of work to make the site modern looking.
[1] https://git.brucewillis.sexy/~tombert/fs_index I promise, safe for work, despite the URL.
I like the search ui. my projects become functional but never polished. https://github.com/sbeckeriv/memoir
Is there any site/project that works as a fully customizable personal front-end to all other SERPs?
When I search for something, I always want a link to the best Wikipedia result. This should always be in the same place and have a giant icon/picture.
Then there could be easily clickable links to the SERP pages for Google, DDG, etc. for that query.
A big link to route it to your favorite LLM.
Seems like you could have a really useful "homepage" for all searches that sat in front of all the other sites. It could be local only and would not require indexing the web. Also wouldn't be a files search thing, as Hister appears to be.
It's badly needed, and so far it's working well for me.