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Hister – A private, full content search index that you control

hister.org

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Re: Hister – A private, full content search index that you control

#11

Post by Carrok »

asciimoo wrote: post #9
Carrok wrote: post #4

I tried this out this week and liked it but really wish this project had some form of auth. Opening the contents of every page you’ve ever visited, even to the local network, is not the best idea.

Hister supports token based, password based, and OIDC/OAuth authentications with optional multi-user handling. Details about user handling can be found here: https://hister.org/docs/user-handling It also has a "public mode" where anyone can search the indexed content, but only authenticated users can add or modify it.

It seemed like the public mode was the default when I set it up. If so, that’s a fairly dangerous default as keeping a “clean” history with no secrets leaked seems neigh impossible.

Re: Hister – A private, full content search index that you control

#12

Post by pbronez »

asciimoo wrote: post #2

Ohi, author here! Thanks for posting Hister. Feel free to A.M.A. My first free software search project was Searx, a privacy respecting metasearch engine, but because of the limitations of the metasearch concept, I've decided to take a different approach. Hister builds a personal search index from pages you visit, bookmarks, browser history, local files, and crawled websites. It stores extracted content with offline r…

I've been using LinkDing + SingleFile for this. Nice to have another option!

Re: Hister – A private, full content search index that you control

#13

Post by renegat0x0 »

I have created something similar, yet different. I maintain my own Internet domain index.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

Also I maintain android app that can be used to search places.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.github.rumcajs.offlineweb...

I believe hister you have to fill in with your data, right?

Re: Hister – A private, full content search index that you control

#14

Post by oulipo »

asciimoo wrote: post #2

Ohi, author here! Thanks for posting Hister. Feel free to A.M.A. My first free software search project was Searx, a privacy respecting metasearch engine, but because of the limitations of the metasearch concept, I've decided to take a different approach. Hister builds a personal search index from pages you visit, bookmarks, browser history, local files, and crawled websites. It stores extracted content with offline r…

You should integrate with Karakeep.app, it's only natural that you'd want both a search engine, and a nice "archive" and "article pretty view" features :)

Re: Hister – A private, full content search index that you control

#15

Post by asciimoo »

Groxx wrote: post #6
asciimoo wrote: post #2

Ohi, author here! Thanks for posting Hister. Feel free to A.M.A. My first free software search project was Searx, a privacy respecting metasearch engine, but because of the limitations of the metasearch concept, I've decided to take a different approach. Hister builds a personal search index from pages you visit, bookmarks, browser history, local files, and crawled websites. It stores extracted content with offline r…

> Hister builds a personal search index from pages you visit, bookmarks, browser history, local files, and crawled websites. Immediately interested and will check it out, thank you! I've wanted a "search stuff you've seen online" tool for a long time, but everything seems to be research-oriented or "archive but don't search" or some weird combination that means it's nigh useless to me. I've got decades of bookmarks a…

Exactly! I had the very same issues before Hister.

> One question if ya don't mind, while I explore: any chance of singlefile support?

Yes, partially. Hister can already import HTML files created by SingleFile, but there is no direct integration yet. In the longer term, I would like the SingleFile extension to be able to send snapshots directly to Hister.

Re: Hister – A private, full content search index that you control

#16

Post by Jon_m »

asciimoo wrote: post #2

Ohi, author here! Thanks for posting Hister. Feel free to A.M.A. My first free software search project was Searx, a privacy respecting metasearch engine, but because of the limitations of the metasearch concept, I've decided to take a different approach. Hister builds a personal search index from pages you visit, bookmarks, browser history, local files, and crawled websites. It stores extracted content with offline r…

[dead]

Re: Hister – A private, full content search index that you control

#17

Post by asciimoo »

oulipo wrote: post #14
asciimoo wrote: post #2

Ohi, author here! Thanks for posting Hister. Feel free to A.M.A. My first free software search project was Searx, a privacy respecting metasearch engine, but because of the limitations of the metasearch concept, I've decided to take a different approach. Hister builds a personal search index from pages you visit, bookmarks, browser history, local files, and crawled websites. It stores extracted content with offline r…

You should integrate with Karakeep.app, it's only natural that you'd want both a search engine, and a nice "archive" and "article pretty view" features :)

What do you mean by integration? Hister already supports importing data from Karakeep, Linkding, Linkwarden, Readeck, Shaarli, and wallabag: https://hister.org/docs/import

Re: Hister – A private, full content search index that you control

#18

Post by asciimoo »

dented42 wrote: post #5
asciimoo wrote: post #2

Ohi, author here! Thanks for posting Hister. Feel free to A.M.A. My first free software search project was Searx, a privacy respecting metasearch engine, but because of the limitations of the metasearch concept, I've decided to take a different approach. Hister builds a personal search index from pages you visit, bookmarks, browser history, local files, and crawled websites. It stores extracted content with offline r…

What’s the safari story look like right now?

Safari support is currently stalled in this PR: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/pull/46. I do not have access to macOS, so help with development and testing would be very welcome.

Re: Hister – A private, full content search index that you control

#19

Post by wmchen »

I set this up a few months ago based on asciimoo's comments on HN, and barely used it at first, but I realized not too long ago that it could be a pretty useful research tool for one of my hobbies (award travel), that revolves around being in the know around various concepts and quirks.

I scraped and imported posts from the blogs I regularly reference for award travel, then hooked it up to OpenCode/Codex as an MCP server and used that corpus for research on those topics. So I can ask things like "has anyone ever mentioned running into this problem before?" [1]

If you have a hobby or working situation that requires you to regularly reference a core set of websites or reference materials, Hister provides almost all the tools out of the box to start a search engine against it. The default datasets they promote include the Python Stlib, MDN and RFC corpus, as an example. [2]

[1]: https://wmchen.com/blog/revisiting-hister/

[2]: https://hister.org/datasets

Re: Hister – A private, full content search index that you control

#20

Post by asciimoo »

Carrok wrote: post #11
asciimoo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hister supports token based, password based, and OIDC/OAuth authentications with optional multi-user handling. Details about user handling can be found here: https://hister.org/docs/user-handling It also has a "public mode" where anyone can search the indexed content, but only authenticated users can add or modify it.

It seemed like the public mode was the default when I set it up. If so, that’s a fairly dangerous default as keeping a “clean” history with no secrets leaked seems neigh impossible.

The default configuration binds only to localhost, and a fresh installation starts with an empty database/index. Could you clarify which specific attack surface you are concerned about in that scenario?
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