Hister – A private, full content search index that you control
Hister is a new self-hosted search engine designed to help users privately index and retrieve their own digital content. It stands out for its strong emphasis on user control and data privacy, appealing directly to Hacker News's appreciation for open-source, self-sovereign tools. The project aims to empower individuals to build a personal knowledge base without relying on external cloud services or sacrificing data privacy.
The Lowdown
Hister presents itself as a personal, privacy-focused search index that users control entirely. It enables individuals to build a searchable knowledge base from their own digital footprint, including web pages, local files, and browser history, all without telemetry or mandatory cloud services. The project's core philosophy centers on preserving knowledge while maintaining strict user control over data.
- Self-Hosted & Private: Designed to run on personal machines or servers with no telemetry or external requests, ensuring complete data privacy.
- Full Content Indexing: Goes beyond titles and URLs, indexing the full content of chosen documents and web pages for comprehensive search capabilities.
- Advanced Search & Previews: Offers a powerful query language with fields, phrases, wildcards, and negation, alongside readable previews of stored content directly in search results.
- Diverse Indexing Sources: Gathers content from browser extensions (for visited pages), local file watchers, imported browser history, and website crawlers.
- Multiple Interfaces: Access the index via web, terminal, command-line interface (CLI), HTTP API, and even an MCP server for AI assistants.
- Auditable & Open Source: The software is public and licensed under AGPLv3, allowing for transparency and auditing of its privacy claims.
- Flexible Deployment: Supports single-binary quick starts, SQLite or PostgreSQL for storage, multi-user setups, and Docker/Nix deployments.
Hister aims to be a comprehensive solution for personal knowledge management, offering a robust, private alternative to general-purpose search engines for one's own data.