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- While I love Karakeep, the truth is that I'm using it to solve this exact same problem, even though its project goals are not as well aligned. I would seriously consider giving Hister a try because it seems like a better fit. Bonus points for being written in Go.
I suppose the one thing I need would be an easy way to share links into Hister. Hopefully we will see both Android/iOS mobile apps to send links into Hister and better support for Safari. I wonder what could be possible with the extensions support available on mobile browsers too (Safari, MS Edge, Firefox).
by evanjrowley - Time to shameless plug my own easy to host your own content search index
Webtm.io
All open source and small enough to deploy. I deploy to cf webworkers so it’s the only place it’s tested.
One cool thing is we work on iOS, chrome and friends, Firefox and pretty much everywhere. We do require you bring your own LLM though.
by alexnewman - - lots of stupid questions to the author from a guy who has no idea about search engines
- let us say I want to index every blog ever listed on HN
- should be a small subset of the 400 billion pages out there on the internet no?
- First I need to gather data, what do you use to load so many webpages rapidly? asyncio with aiohttp in python? are there better options?
- how do you handle proxies? rotation? are there libraries you recommend for this?
- what about pages that use cloudflare? or block your request or present a captcha or a challenge of some kind?
- what are the filetypes you collect? only html or media as well?
- where and in what format do you store all these collected files? flat file storage? duckdb? postgres? hstore? something else?
- what is the frequency at which you refresh each page? once a day? once a week? something else?
- what kind of pre-processing do you use on the collected data? remove extra spaces? special characters? some kind of complex regex pipeline? LLM?
- how do you match the incoming query with processed data? simple text matching? regex? vector embedding match? something else?
by vivzkestrel - 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?
by renegat0x0 - 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.by Carrok
- I just finished setting this up yesterday and I'm kind of obsessed with it. I was previously a heavy user of Karakeep, but I hated forgetting to save something and losing it. I also think Hister's semantic search is a better solution than AI generated summaries and tags. Support for local docs is super cool too, I have it set up to index my org notes directory.by quasigod
- 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]
by wmchen - 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 result previews, so information remains searchable even when the original page changes or disappears. It supports full text and semantic search, can run entirely on your own machine, and includes a web interface, command line tools, and an MCP endpoint for assistant integrations.
Project page: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister
Tiny read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/
by asciimoo