hister

Project Overview

Hister is a private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep. It indexes their full contents so you can find information again from the web interface, terminal, or an AI assistant connected through MCP.

Key Features

• Privacy focused: No telemetry or mandatory cloud service. Run locally or on infrastructure you control
• Full text indexing: Search the actual contents of visited pages and local files, not only titles and URLs
• Automatic browser indexing: Save newly visited pages with the Firefox or Chrome extension
• Powerful queries: Use field filters, phrases, wildcards, negation, aliases, and result priorities
• Optional semantic search: Find documents by meaning through an embeddings endpoint you configure
• Crawler and browser import: Index websites or bring in existing browser history
• Web, terminal, and MCP clients: Search from the browser, TUI, command line, or an AI assistant
• Multi-user support: Keep each user's documents and search results separate on a shared server

Target Audience

• Users who need a private personal search engine
• Developers who want full-text search over browsing history and local files
• Users who want to search personal knowledge bases through AI assistants via MCP

Quick Start

1. Download the binary for your platform from the latest release, then rename it to hister (hister.exe on Windows)
2. On Linux or macOS, make it executable: chmod +x hister
3. Start Hister: ./hister listen (on Windows, run ./hister.exe listen in PowerShell)
4. Open http://127.0.0.1:4433 and install the browser extension

Core Advantages

• Completely private with no telemetry and no cloud sync
• Full-text indexing, not limited to titles and URLs
• Four clients: Web, TUI, CLI, and MCP
• Optional semantic search

System Requirements

• OS: Cross-platform (pre-built binaries available)
• Additional Dependencies: Go 1.26, npm, C compiler (when building from source)