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Hister

Build and run your own search engine.

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Hister is a self-hosted search engine that indexes the full content of web pages and local files, keeping the index and stored previews on a server you configure. It is designed for retrieving previously found information without relying on bookmarks or filenames, with no telemetry or mandatory cloud service.

Sources include browser extensions for visited pages, local file watching, browser history imports, and a website crawler. Search runs through the web interface, terminal client, CLI, HTTP API, and MCP server for AI assistants. Query support covers field filters, quoted phrases, wildcards, negation, date ranges, and aliases, with stored previews shown alongside results. Content extractors, optional semantic search, skip and priority rules, version tracking, language-specific indexes, and multiple crawler backends are also available.

Hister is distributed as free software under AGPLv3. It can run as a single binary locally or on a shared server with user-scoped access using SQLite or PostgreSQL, with Docker and Nix packaging options.

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