Hister

Your own search engine

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.

Try the demo · Download Hister · Read the quickstart · Documentation

!Hister web interface

Quickstart

1. Download the binary for your platform from the latest release, then rename it to hister (hister.exe on Windows).

1. On Linux or macOS, make it executable:

chmod +x hister

1. Start Hister on Linux or macOS:

./hister listen

On Windows, run .\hister.exe listen in PowerShell.

Keep this terminal open while using Hister. The server must be running to index pages and search them.

1. Open and install the browser extension for Firefox or Chrome.

1. Visit a web page with the extension enabled, then return to Hister and search for a phrase from that page to find your first indexed result.

To search existing content, import browser history, index local directories, or import files.

Alternative installation methods include Homebrew (brew install hister), Docker, and Nix. See the installation guide for instructions.

Features

• Privacy focused: No telemetry or mandatory cloud service. Run Hister 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.

Privacy

By default, Hister has no telemetry and no cloud sync. The browser extension sends indexed page content only to the Hister server you configure, apart from downloading page favicons. The server stores documents and search indexes on that server.

Optional semantic search sends document text to the embeddings endpoint you choose. Review the privacy overview and semantic search configuration before enabling remote integrations.

Development

Requirements are Go 1.26, npm, and a C compiler for CGO dependencies.

git clone https://github.com/asciimoo/hister.git
cd hister
./manage.sh build

To work on the web app with hot reload and automatic Go rebuilds:

npm run serve:app

This starts a Vite development server and the Go backend with automatic rebuilds through air.

Community and contributing

Join us on IRCNet in #hister or on Discord.

Read CONTRIBUTING.md before submitting a change. Bugs and suggestions belong in the issue tracker. For security reports, see SECURITY.md.

Sponsors

AGPLv3 or any later version