Hister – A private, full content search index that you control
Your Own
Search Engine
Hister turns the pages you visit and the files you keep into a private, full content search index that you control.
Free software on GitHub
HisterThe ultimate way to protect digital privacy
hister.org/posts
Keep useful pages close, searchable, and under your control...
privacy-notes.md
~/documents/notes
A private index makes the things you already found useful again.
Free software
AGPLv3
Self hosted
Run it on your own machine or server
Privacy focused
No telemetry, no external requests
Preserve Knowledge.
Find It Again.
Hister stores extracted document content with the search index and displays it as a readable preview alongside search results.
Search the content you chose to index
Look beyond bookmarks and filenames. Hister indexes the full content of the pages and files you choose, then keeps that searchable knowledge on a server you control.
Search the actual content
Look beyond titles and URLs to the words inside every indexed document.
Narrow with precision
Use fields, phrases, wildcards, negation, priorities, and your own aliases.
Read it in context
Open a clean stored preview beside the results without losing your search.
Collect
Save newly visited pages with the browser extension, watch local folders, import your history, or crawl a site.
Index
Hister extracts the parts that matter and indexes their full text on the server you choose.
Find
Search from the web, terminal, command line, or let an AI assistant retrieve it through MCP.
Browser extensions can index pages as they are visited. File watchers, history imports, and crawlers add other sources to the same index.
Preserve Knowledge.
Keep Control.
The index, stored page content, and rules remain on the Hister server you configure. The server has no telemetry and does not require a cloud service.
Read the privacy modelNo telemetry
The server does not phone home or report what you search.
No mandatory cloud
A complete personal setup can run on one local machine.
Your chosen server
Clients send indexed content only to the Hister server you configure.
Auditable software
The source is public and licensed as free software under AGPLv3.
Your sources
Pages, files, and history you choose
Your Hister server
Extraction, rules, and searchable index
Your answers
Results, previews, and integrations
Optional semantic search sends text to the embeddings endpoint you configure. Browser 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.
- Browser extensions
- Local file watching
- History import
- Website crawler
Search precisely
Full text search supports field filters, quoted phrases, wildcards, negation, date ranges, and query aliases.
- Field filters
- Quoted phrases
- Wildcards and negation
- Query aliases
Extract content
Content extractors handle structured data from supported formats and websites. Semantic search is optional.
- Content extractors
- Semantic search
- Language aware indexes
- Readable previews
Apply index rules
Skip and priority rules control indexing and ranking. Versioning can retain earlier document content.
- Skip rules
- Priority rules
- Version tracking
- Sensitive content checks
Use multiple interfaces
The same index is available through the web interface, terminal client, CLI, HTTP API, and MCP server.
- Web interface
- Terminal interface
- HTTP API and CLI
- MCP server
Choose a deployment
A single binary can run locally. Shared servers support user scoped access with SQLite or PostgreSQL.
- No config quickstart
- SQLite or PostgreSQL
- Multiple users
- Docker and Nix
Additional capabilities
Hister also supports multiple crawler backends, language specific indexes, content versioning, ownership rules, and configurable extractors.
Source: hackernews