Overview
Hister is your personal, privacy-first search engine, designed to make finding information effortless. It meticulously indexes the full content of your visited web pages and local files, empowering you to rediscover knowledge through a versatile web interface, a powerful terminal client, or even an AI assistant integrated via MCP. Keep your information private and accessible, all on your own infrastructure.
Key Features
- Privacy-Centric Design: Enjoy a search engine with no telemetry and no mandatory cloud services. Hister runs locally or on infrastructure you control, ensuring your data remains yours.
- Comprehensive Content Indexing: Go beyond titles and URLs. Hister indexes the actual content of your visited pages and files, allowing for truly in-depth searches.
- Seamless Browser Integration: Automatically save newly visited pages with dedicated Firefox and Chrome extensions.
- Advanced Query Capabilities: Harness the power of field filters, phrases, wildcards, negation, aliases, and result prioritization for precise search results.
- Optional Semantic Search: Enhance your search experience by finding documents based on meaning through a configurable embeddings endpoint.
- Flexible Data Import: Easily index entire websites with the crawler or import your existing browser history to get started quickly.
- Multi-Client Access: Search your indexed data from anywhere – via the intuitive web UI, a powerful terminal interface (TUI), the command line, or integrated with AI assistants.
- Multi-User Support: Securely manage separate search spaces for different users on a shared Hister server.
Typical Use Cases
- Personal Knowledge Management: Never lose a piece of information again. Index your research, notes, and frequently visited websites for quick recall.
- Developer Productivity: Quickly find code snippets, documentation, and past solutions within your browsing history and local project files.
- Academic Research: Organize and search through a vast collection of online resources and local research papers with unparalleled precision.
- Secure Information Retrieval: For individuals and organizations prioritizing data privacy, Hister offers a self-hosted search solution that keeps sensitive information secure.
- AI Assistant Integration: Empower your AI assistants with direct access to your personal knowledge base, allowing them to provide more contextually relevant and accurate responses.
