hister

Hister is a self-hosted personal search engine that builds a private index from the web pages you visit and the files you keep. Rather than searching titles and URLs only, it indexes full document contents so previously encountered information can be found again. Key capabilities described in the README: - Privacy focused: no telemetry and no mandatory cloud service; it can run locally or on infrastructure you control. - Full text indexing of visited pages and local files. - Automatic browser indexing through Firefox and Chrome extensions. - Query features including field filters, phrases, wildcards, negation, aliases, and result priorities. - Optional semantic search via an embeddings endpoint the user configures. - Crawler support and browser history import, plus local directory indexing and file import. - Multiple clients: web interface, terminal UI, command line, and MCP for AI assistants. - Multi-user support, keeping each user's documents and search results separate on a shared server. Quickstart: download the platform binary from the latest release, rename it to hister (hister.exe on Windows), make it executable on Linux/macOS, then run `./hister listen` (or `.\hister.exe listen` in PowerShell). The server must stay running to index and search. The web interface is at http://127.0.0.1:4433, where a browser extension for Firefox or Chrome can be installed. Visiting a page with the extension enabled and then searching for a phrase from it demonstrates the first indexed result. No configuration is required for a local personal setup. Alternative installation methods include Homebrew, Docker, and Nix. Privacy notes: by default there is no telemetry or cloud sync. The browser extension sends indexed page content only to the configured Hister server, aside from downloading page favicons. Optional semantic search sends document text to the chosen embeddings endpoint. Development requires Go 1.26, npm, and a C compiler for CGO dependencies. Build with `./manage.sh build`; `npm run serve:app` starts a Vite dev server with automatic Go rebuilds via air. Community channels include IRCNet #hister and Discord. Licensed under AGPLv3 or later.