A recent discussion about this tool

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49351802

Saw on Discord that they have to change their name, since https://histre.com sent them a letter.

Thanks, that looks interesting, I will test it out and see if it continuously sync or must be manually imported from time to time, or if it can replaces linkwarden entirely. My linkwarden instance also saves as a pdf not just html and bookmarks are in GB in size, if hister does it more efficiently it’s even better.

Or something similar enough to what you wanted that you don’t notice it’s a different thing. That’s awful.

Nothing about this depends on the provider, you could spin up a local Qwen and give it a search tool like SearXNG or something. At this point local models are more than good enough for simple tasks like that. Using ChatGPT is just (usually) faster and simpler

There should be no real vendor lock in in my opinion. You can ask the same question with pi + qwen (or any harness + good enough model) with internet access and it will work. Chatgpt is just one option came in handy.

"Goddammit, I'm wholly dependent on Merriam-Webster, what ever am I going to do".

Ooh, very nice! I have my own tool I’ve been using for this [https://github.com/bradrn/full-history-search/], and it’s incredibly useful, but it’s also pretty primitive. This one looks a lot nicer.

I remember this as well. I hadn't noticed it was gone until just now, but you're right.

Edit: Found it. Thanks Claude.

https://github.com/ssnangua/google-chrome-comic-hd/blob/main...

https://dfir.blog/history-index-files-removed-from-chrome-v3...

I think due to technical constraints.

I think due to shareholders wanting new sportcars. The offline pages don't show Google Ads.

There was also Google Desktop Search for several years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop

When chrome was literally first released it was in fact faster than IE and Firefox, by quite a lot, and had some nice features that neither had, too. But that gap didn't last for long.

It was so much faster you could not believe it. It was a revelation and even though "degoogling" was already a thing, Chrome was so much better than the rest that you just had to use it. Tabs actually worked without crashing your PC.

The risks were clear from day one but Google and Chrome were great to both users and devs, and it stayed like that for a long time.

IE5 only on the mac, did this too.

Not sure if the same product. I think the one I used was Google Desktop.

I even hacked it for a company I was working for at the time: I installed it in a machine that had a lot of pdfs from some other client company of them.

I don't recall the exact details, but I did some sort of proxying between the Microsoft Web Server that came with NT? at the time and G Desktop, and then an entire team of first support agents had almost instant search across all those docs. Good times.

This is really cool. I like the idea of combining it with a offline Wikipedia cache.

I've been using this since the last time it came up on here. I don't have it index every page I visit, I use the browser plugin to tell it to index specific ones. It is useful for sure, but I think it will really shine once I've been using it long enough for it to build up a bigger index of things that are old enough that I've actually forgotten about them.

Thanks so much for this, I'm using it all the time. I self host a few things, but I'm using this the most.

In that case, clipshot.org is also available.

The main difference I see is Hister focuses on creating an active knowledge base and finding information quickly, while ArchiveBox focuses on preserving web content for the long term.

"Optional global or personal access token used to authenticate extension requests."

Looks like you can even set authentication up so you can run it at home but connect while you're away too...

Never even noticed that was missing and it's probably why nobody else uses it. I took it from https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/xyepiu/cherry_a... and https://cherry.haishan.me/ and just worked from the Dockerfile

Thanks for making Hister, I've been using it for a few days (~7k docs) and I'm impressed so far.

Histerekishi / Histereki - れきし/歴史 means history in Japanese. reki れき/歴 is a suffix which means (history of)

Histeri

MyHister(i)

Hyster(y)

Also, I have been using your app for two months now. I have only had to rely on it a few times, but each time I did it worked beautifully. Thank you.

"It looks like our name conflicts with a registered trademark in the US. "

So? Where are you based? For what class was the trademark filed? When was it filed?

I doubt that he has any leverage, but I don't know the background.

Thanks so much for creating this. Installed last time it was posted and have been loving it. The MCP server and extensions and userscripts are great QOL additions, as well. Always wondered if something was out there like this and you answered my prayers! New name suggestion: MisterHistory

Tailscale is one option

Would like: * Local web page interface or even browser UI element (since extension needed anyway) * Ability to add notes to history * Flag if bookmarked, allow filtering "bookmarks only" * Keep old versions of pages * Human-readable text diff vs current live page

OMG, you win!!! :-D

is this like a pihole? is there a design difference you are going for here?

What about "searchy.me"?

Genuinely curious, how could one fight pre-emptive domain squatters once any candidate is publicly suggested?

When I have suggested names in other situations like this in the past, I spent the ~$10 to get the domain, and offered the transfer the free. Of course, not everyone would do this.

Appreciate the response! I'll be eagerly following Hister's progress. For now, I've settled on a mix of Instapaper and using SingleFile uploads to Dropbox.

Exactly, this is the biggest advantage of the extension. It is fully invisible for the websites, so no captcha, anti-bot protection, no authentication issues, every common bottleneck of a classic crawler is solved by the browser/user.

hisect (history and bisect)

Seekfold (seek and manifold)

Seekdex (seek and index)

I gather rss feeds from the websites I visit and it's hard to express how interesting they are. The gut says it borderlines some random collection but that couldn't be more wrong. I also enjoyed YaCy, that project should have a good amount of ideas for you. I kinda end up assigning more and more bandwidth until it gets in the way and I forget to enable it again. The turtle button on some torrent clients is a good invention.

Histeria

Srchr

The thing I most struggle with in this domain is recalling information from videos. I watch/listen to a lot of hour+ lectures and I rely on this website deeply:

https://filmot.com/

It lets you search YouTube transcripts. If you could somehow integrate video transcripts into this tool, I would be extremely interested in trying it out

May I suggest Yahoox!

I am happy to see the idea of history search more. I am on my 3rd version of my own. the use of local LLMs has made it easier to support features like weekly summarized and recipe extraction.

I like the search ui. my projects become functional but never polished. https://github.com/sbeckeriv/memoir

I've been trying this out the past few weeks. I was literally just in there searching for a link 5 minutes ago.

It's badly needed, and so far it's working well for me.

Your own search engine — Hister is a private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep.

Is there any site/project that works as a fully customizable personal front-end to all other SERPs?

When I search for something, I always want a link to the best Wikipedia result. This should always be in the same place and have a giant icon/picture.

Then there could be easily clickable links to the SERP pages for Google, DDG, etc. for that query.

A big link to route it to your favorite LLM.

Seems like you could have a really useful "homepage" for all searches that sat in front of all the other sites. It could be local only and would not require indexing the web. Also wouldn't be a files search thing, as Hister appears to be.

I guess he meant it in a "look, I made a cool thing that is useful to me, but don't go throwing away your current organizational method just yet nor leave it open to the internet" way.

I vibed most of it (and though I like the code that was output, I coached it with some custom skills). If I were to share it out, I'd probably clean up some of the tools to make their interfaces smaller and cleaner. And make the docs a lot simpler. I'd probably also create some form of dashboard so you can see what's happening (all the docs scraped and saved), etc.

EDIT: it's also the type of thing that feels very personally customized for my needs. I encourage you to build something similar on the idea. Much like how Karpathy Wiki was suggestive and not a runtime to just use...

Yeup, as I mentioned, it kind of feels like a Yak-shave....but it was fun building it, and gave me some experience with agentic coding and new technologies I don't normally work with. It's nice to dig into for some research.

The biggest win was the realization that both firefox and chrome maintain all the links you visit in a very queryable SQLite database. I've been poking at that for a lot of custom tools, like WHAT JIRA tickets am I paying attention to this week, etc....

"I can't practice minimum quality control as a web dev" doesn't sound like a problem with the standard.

have it up on GitHub, but I don't think anyone should use my implementation.

ditto, it's an experiment in near-vibe coding, which also uses Typesense for queries using BM-25 & RAG with fusion. I have the web search/fetch/crawl features persisting raw intermediate values (api responses, search result lists) because I might re-use them one day... at least good for auditability if I need to

related, it is using Hister author's prior project SearXNG as one of the search providers

Hah, I bought that URL a long time ago, mostly as an in-joke between me and some friends since Bruce Willis was my favorite actor. Then later I needed a dev URL for some work I was doing, and the only one I had free was brucewillis.sexy. Then I kept making subdomains on it for different things and eventually it just became the default.

I like it.

Yes: https://hister.org/posts/how-hister-makes-the-social-web-sea...

Very true.

Even full page screenshot doesn’t always capture the non visible part of the page (below the viewport).

a large percentage of sites will not print out correctly as a PDF these days.

Reader mode.

Yeah, about search:

    $ pdfgrep -r -i -n -H "your mom" ~/PDFArchives/

Very effective, very fast, very private. Bonus points if the PDF filename itself is derived from a well formulated <title> tag, such that you can just use “ls” ..

You could combine it with existing products like DevonThink that are meant for researchers organizing documents and provide tagging, semantic search, similarity graphs, and so on.

Building from source is nowadays writing one sentence in a chat box. Your idea of extra work is either unbelievably lazy or perhaps outdated by a few years.

Why even ask the question?

After that I run them in containers, no network access, ro filesystem.

good luck auditing all transitive dependencies

Distro maintainers aren’t infallible either. At the end of the day it’s up to you to decide where and how much trust you place and do your due diligence from there.

One thing that can be helpful when reasoning about things like this is figuring out what your actual threat model is. What does system compromise look like to you? Data exfiltration, arbitrary code execution, something else?

I think the best answer lies somewhere in compartmentalization and fine-grained permissions. In this case: run it in some kind of secure container which has access to read browser history, and write to its database, but definitely does not have network access.

Unfortunately there's no one-size-fits-all solution for this yet, but there are a lot of groups attacking it from different angles: Qubes, GrapheneOS, Firejail, Bubblewrap, Android/iOS app permissions, Landlock, App Sandbox, etc.

Bonus point for having an IRC channel for community forum.

I thought that said Hitler at first.

It's really great you've done all that work for importing from other apps - I use Karakeep and at first didnt know how much redundancy I have between the two, but now I am going to try this since I have so much of it already setup.

Had a double take as initially read it as Hitler...

The default interface is web based: https://demo.hister.org/

Notes are not supported yet, only labels. But it is a useful addition, added to my TODO.

Been running hister on my work machine for a month or two now. It's one of those things I don't look at until I need to, but when I do need it, it solves the dreaded hunting through the last month of browser history.

I also have it index my Obsidian notes, which is another little bonus for global search.

I did need to build up quite a few exclusion rules early on, but it's been hands off since.

Imagine the security vulnerabilities

first line of the open-source readme: ~download the binary for windows~ -- paved with good intentions?

It can also send to a self-hosted linkding, quite nice: https://linkding.link/archiving/#using-the-singlefile-browse...

Will definitely be giving this a try. The marketing website looks good. Did you have an LLM do the design?

I use Chrome

at first glance i thought it was called hitler

I'd love a extension setting to only send tabs that were visible for ~4+ seconds.

I built myself a little extension last year that tracks what information I was looking at, but focused on generating "new info" recaps for the day / week.

I realized that I open / quick view a lot of pages and close them, which is a strong signal that I don't care about that specific page, and it shouldn't be a source of "new insights" that I learnt that day (since I probably don't care about that topic).

I'd love to re-try a simpler version of that project that builds on Hister as a backend actually.

Love this kind of system, so many useful mashup apps to build on top!