Hister is a self-hosted, open-source search engine designed for individuals and teams seeking to index and search their own files, browsing history, and web content while maintaining privacy. It enables full-text search across both local documents and visited websites, allowing users to find information based on the actual content rather than just titles or URLs. The platform is built with a focus on privacy, ensuring that all data remains local with no telemetry, cloud sync, or third-party service dependencies.
The tool offers a range of features to enhance search capabilities. It automatically saves and indexes every web page visited through its browser extension, making the entire browsing history searchable without manual intervention. Hister supports semantic search powered by optional AI embeddings, enabling context-aware and intent-driven results. Advanced querying tools include field filters, boolean operators, phrase matching, wildcards, and personal query aliases for efficient recall. Users can preview indexed pages offline in a reader-friendly format, and the built-in crawler supports both standard HTTP and real browser backends for indexing JavaScript-heavy sites. Local file indexing is also supported, with directories watched for changes and the index updated automatically.
Hister is suitable for both individual and shared deployments, offering multi-user support with separate indexes, API tokens, and per-user content rules. It allows importing existing browsing history from Firefox and Chrome, and provides a history view to revisit past search queries and indexed documents. The tool features browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox, and includes a terminal-based user interface (TUI) for searching directly from the command line with keyboard navigation and configurable hotkeys. Multi-language support is available, with automatic language detection and dedicated per-language indexes to improve search relevance across multilingual content.
Additional capabilities include defining content rules to block unwanted sites, prioritize important domains, preserve document versions, and create custom query shortcuts. Hister can expose its search index as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) tool for AI assistants to query browsing history directly. The software is distributed under the AGPLv3 license and is available for free.
Hister sits in PulseGate's Infrastructure & Backend category. It lets users run a personal search engine across their files and browsing history. Hister is an open-source project aimed at privacy-focused users and developers. The project is open source (AGPL-3.0). Hister is available on the web, the command line, and embeddable surfaces.
asciimoo builds and maintains Hister, and the product first shipped in 2026. The project is developed in the open on GitHub with 1.3k stars and 737 commits in the last 90 days. Among its 4 catalogued features are full-text search, personal data indexing, and browser integration.
Latest indexed changes and source events
Other apps tracked under the same category.
