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:

Full text search across web pages, PDFs, docx files, Markdown, OrgMode and text files
Phrase searches, field filters, date filters, wildcards, negation, aliases, labels, facets, and result priorities
Optional semantic search using an embeddings endpoint you configure
Persistent website crawls
Imports from browser history, Linkwarden, Karakeep, Shaarli, Wallabag, and Linkding
Web, terminal, command line, HTTP API, and MCP interfaces
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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] asciimoo@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

it’s a habit changer.

It took some time to get used to it, but I find it more efficient, to spawn a Hister with a single hotkey and use the URL bar with a traditional search engine when I know that I'm looking for something new. But, of course this is subjective, everbody has their preferred workflows, I shared mine as an inspiration.

Btw, you can start your query with !!, in this case Hister automatically redirects you to your external search engine with the rest of the search query.