this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
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Hister: a private search engine [AIP] (github.com)
submitted 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) by asciimoo@lemmy.ml to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hi everyone,

I am the original author of Searx. I started Hister with a similar motivation: reducing our dependence on external search engines while keeping searches and personal data under our control.

Searx is a metasearch engine that forwards queries to other search providers. Hister takes a different approach. It builds a private full text index from content you choose, then searches that index entirely on your own infrastructure.

Hister can automatically index pages through its Firefox and Chrome extensions. It can also watch local directories, import browser history and bookmarks, index individual URLs, and crawl complete documentation sites.

The feature I find most useful is offline previews. Hister stores the readable content and HTML of indexed pages locally. You can open a result in a clean and sanitized preview beside the search results without visiting the original website again.

Some other features:

  1. Full text search across web pages, PDFs, docx files, Markdown, OrgMode and text files
  2. Phrase searches, field filters, date filters, wildcards, negation, aliases, labels, facets, and result priorities
  3. Optional semantic search using an embeddings endpoint you configure
  4. Persistent website crawls
  5. Imports from browser history, Linkwarden, Karakeep, Shaarli, Wallabag, and Linkding
  6. Web, terminal, command line, HTTP API, and MCP interfaces
  7. SQLite and PostgreSQL support, plus optional multiple user hosting

Hister cannot replace a global search engine (yet) for subjects you have never encountered because it only searches what you have indexed. My workflow is to search Hister first, then use its shortcut to fall back to traditional search when I need broader web results.

The project is free software under the AGPLv3+ license. It can be installed as a standalone binary or with Docker.

Project: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister

Website and documentation: https://hister.org/

Small read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/

I'd appreciate feedback, questions, and suggestions as well as joining our growing community.

AI disclosure: AI assisted contributions are not strictly prohibited, but all contributions should be made by humans. More details: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#ai-policy

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[–] curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 4 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

@asciimoo@lemmy.ml please update the title with the appropriate tag (rule 7) and if AI was involved in development, add the disclosure per rule 8 (sample disclosures can be found here)

Thanks!

[–] asciimoo@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 hours ago

Thanks for letting me know. I've updated the post.

[–] MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Any interested in making this a federated search?

I've been toying with the idea of a web-ring style search engine where it uses the fediverse's post and sub system so that you can subscribe to "indexers" that are made by other users (or even mastodon users themselves) so that you can have highly targeted search engine systems. So, for example, you could make multiple search "scopes" and each of those scopes would follow specific other "sources" and search from them. Likewise, users could provide links and descriptions to add new entries to each scope which would, in essense, work like a fediverse post and then be distributed to all other interested parties.

I haven't done a lick of implementation yet, but thought I'd share the idea here as I consider doing this more and more every day. The only thing I haven't figured out yet is images, because ideally that would be a special type of scope view.

[–] asciimoo@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 hour ago

Federated search is the direction I'd like to go when the core is mature enough.

I'm still trying to figure out the best approach to make the federation secure (no accidental private/confidential data leak) and easy to use. Related conversations: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/discussions/432 & https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/issues/387 . I'd appreciate help to figure out an optimal solution.

[–] ozoned@piefed.social 1 points 54 minutes ago

Already installed and loving this idea.

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 1 points 58 minutes ago* (last edited 57 minutes ago) (1 children)

This seems super cool, you can curate your own search index :O

Being able to preview your search results offline is quite neat too!

One question though, how will you solve the issue of "echo chambers", because from my understanding, it looks like it will only present results that you search for / have searched for, meaning for some people, you could be stuck with results that only support your view of the world.

[–] hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 1 points 29 minutes ago

I mean it kinda looks like that's by design currently. It's an indexer for your corners of the web, not a search aggregator to find new ones.

[–] glizzyguzzler@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Oh damn this could replace the bookmakers. I have Linkding with the Linkding Injector extension, but this would be next level.

You can view the saved text too, nice. Would it be possible to attach an HTML file from like single file for sites that have heavy image content as part of the “view” button? That’d completely replace Linkding/Karakeep/Linkwarden use cases for me

Understandable if not, that’s ancillary to the text search focus

[–] asciimoo@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Oh damn this could replace the bookmakers.

The inspiration for Hister was a bookmarking app, but I realized that I always forget to manually trigger the bookmarking and I miss so many great resources.

Would it be possible to attach an HTML file from like single file

Currently you can import SingleFile HTMLs using the hister import file command, but no further integrations are implemented yet. Although, rendering the exact SinglePage file as a preview can be added relatively quickly. It would be also nice to accept files directly from the SingleFile extension.

Thanks for the good suggestion, I've added it to my TODO! =]