I’m working on a self-hosted search service called Hister with the goal to reduce my dependence on online search engines.

Hister is a full text indexer for websites which saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface & query language to explore previously visited content with ease or quickly fall back to traditional search engines.

I’ve been using it for a few months and as my local index is growing I can avoid opening google/duckduckgo/kagi more and more frequently.

The project is still heavily under development with a growing community, but the current version is in a fairly usable state in my opinion, so I wanted to share it here - perhaps some of you find it useful as well. (Or at least have some constructive criticism =])

The code is AGPLv3 licensed, available at https://github.com/asciimoo/hister website: https://hister.org/ read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/

About me: I develop privacy protecting and data liberating free software since 2008. I’m the author of Searx, Colly (https://github.com/gocolly/colly) and many more smaller free software/self-hosted projects (https://github.com/asciimoo).

Developer @[email protected]

  • y0kai [he/him]@anarchist.nexus
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    3 days ago

    this sounds really cool!

    How did you come up with the name?

    iirc “Hister” is the name of an evil despot used in at least one of Nostradamus’ “prophecies” and is often believed (by those who believe in these things) to be a reference to Hitler.

    its also an ancient name for the River Danube, which flows through much of WWII’s battlefields

    • GrumpyBike1020@monero.town
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      3 days ago

      I thought it was obvious that “hister” was the verb-ificarion of the noun “history” since this thing is a service/tool which produces history.

      Who cares what crackpot Nostradamus said. Nosferatu was more metal anyway 🤘