Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

hister.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 110 posts

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

#21

Post by Groxx »

asciimoo wrote: post #15
Groxx wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I assume it content-extracts that on upload? I'd really like to move storage into hister too, if possible. That way you could also switch from an extracted view to a "full" view in the UI. Though I assume that'd be fairly simple to build later.

Overall I really like what I'm seeing, it ticks a lot of important boxes for me and it's pleasantly straightforward. Hopefully I'll find time to contribute!

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

#22

Post by asciimoo »

pbronez wrote: post #12
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!

That is a great combo. My main friction with it is having to manually capture pages I want to keep.

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

#23

Post by asciimoo »

wmchen wrote: post #19

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 se…

Wow, this is a really inspiring use case and blog post. Thanks for sharing it.

What tools or features would Hister need to support your complete search workflow?

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

#25

Post by iambateman »

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…

Very cool. Does it work to connect my phone and laptop to the same firehose?

I often find myself irritated because I read an article on my phone 6 months ago and the history is gone.

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

#28

Post by asciimoo »

iambateman wrote: post #25
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…

Very cool. Does it work to connect my phone and laptop to the same firehose? I often find myself irritated because I read an article on my phone 6 months ago and the history is gone.

You can host Hister on a home server and access it from multiple devices.

Automatic page capture on mobile currently requires Firefox, since mobile Chrome does not support browser extensions.

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

#30

Post by asciimoo »

exe34 wrote: post #27

Can it import browser bookmarks? It says browser history and a bunch of other bookmark services but not specifically browser bookmarks.

Yes, it can import data from various sources, including browser history, and popular self-hosted bookmarking apps: https://hister.org/docs/import
Post reply on HN