Hister: A free & self-hosted personal search engine

I’m working on a self-hosted search service called Hister with the goal to reduce dependence on online search engines. It can provide significantly more privacy than metasearch engines like Searx.

Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It has a flexible web (and terminal) search interface, offline result previews & query language to explore saved content with ease or quickly fall back to traditional search engines.

I’ve been using it for a few months and as my local index is growing I can avoid opening google/duckduckgo/kagi more and more frequently.

The initial perception is overwhelmingly positive with already more than 25 contributors and hundreds of contributions - perhaps you find it useful as well. (Or at least have some constructive criticism =]) I hope more users and contributors join us to make Hister better and better.

Few useful links:

• Website
• Small read-only demo
• GitHub (AGPLv3)
• Codeberg
• Discord
• #hister on IRCNet

About me: I develop privacy protecting and data liberating free software since 2008. I’m the author of Searx, Colly (GitHub - gocolly/colly: Elegant Scraper and Crawler Framework for Golang · GitHub) and many more smaller free software/self-hosted projects ( asciimoo (Adam Tauber) · GitHub ).