Overview

Hister is your personal, privacy-first search engine, designed to make recalling information from your digital life effortless. It goes beyond simple link indexing by capturing the full content of web pages you visit and files you store. With Hister, you can search across your personal knowledge base via a web interface, a command-line terminal, or even integrate it with AI assistants for a more intuitive way to find what you need. Built with privacy at its core, Hister runs locally, giving you complete control over your data.

Key Features

• Complete Content Indexing: Search the actual text within web pages and files, not just titles or URLs.
• Privacy Focused: Run entirely on your infrastructure with no telemetry or mandatory cloud services.
• Seamless Browser Integration: Automatically indexes visited pages via dedicated Firefox and Chrome extensions.
• Versatile Search Access: Query your data through a modern web UI, a terminal-based interface (TUI), or programmatically.
• Powerful Querying Capabilities: Utilize advanced search operators including field filters, phrases, wildcards, negation, aliases, and result prioritization.
• Optional Semantic Search: Leverage AI to find information based on meaning by connecting to your preferred embeddings endpoint.
• Multi-User Support: Securely manage and separate search data for different users on a shared Hister instance.

Typical Use Cases

• Personal Knowledge Management: Easily retrieve specific information from articles, documents, and websites you've previously encountered, ensuring you never lose a valuable piece of knowledge.
• Research and Development: Quickly find specific code snippets, documentation details, or research papers by searching their full content, accelerating your workflow.
• Private Information Retrieval: Maintain a secure, searchable archive of your personal notes, financial documents, and any sensitive information without relying on third-party cloud storage.
• AI Assistant Integration: Connect Hister to your AI assistant (via MCP) to empower it with direct access to your personal indexed data, enabling more context-aware and accurate responses.
• Team Collaboration (with caution): Deploy Hister on shared infrastructure for teams needing a centralized, searchable repository of internal documents and web research, while respecting individual privacy boundaries.