Hister: A free & self-hosted personal search engine

ph00lt0:

Excuse us for the delay in publishing this (5days) We are getting more and more posts to review due to many ai slop and unready vibe coded projects (read nicely looking frontend with no functionality) being submitted so it starts to take us a bit longer to review submissions as we don’t want to overload the community with such posts.

No worries, it’s better to wait a bit than having low quality content. Thanks for the thorough review and for keeping this community healthy.

My first question immediately was why not direct traffic to DuckDuckGo instead of Google?

We have no way to prove that DDG does better in terms of privacy. But I can prove that they provide lower quality results. The external search engine is configurable, so anybody can set their preferred one (even SearXNG).

which would make my browser even more fingerprintable

Your browser is probably already incredibly “fingerprintable” if you have JS enabled. Especially if you use Firefox and you have any extension installed. (See this post for details). But even without extensions it’s very easy to track someone having JS enabled. On the other hand, if you don’t have JS enabled, you cannot be tracked by extension IDs. So no need to worry about adding more fingerprintability with installing an extension in either case.

EDIT: Using the extension isn’t mandatory it just makes indexing visited sites convenient. You can use Hister’s command line crawler and the API to populate your index.

The best protection against fingerprinting and tracking is not visiting a website. That’s my main approach with Hister. Sure, it takes time to grow your index and you cannot always avoid using the internet, but the more data you have, the less the exposure to privacy threats.