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.

I.e. like any good tool?

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.

Yes. Try it regularly, against inputs I know correspond to things visited or bookmarked within last couple months. Almost never gives the actual result unless it's literal full-string match. That's why I'm complaining.

Maybe stop using the mickey mouse browsers? I mean Firefox is pretty much a lost cause.. unless you start using extensions. I agree those are basic features that should be built-in. In qutebrowser I use them reliably all the time. E.g press T (keybinding for :tab-focus command) - type keyword (matches against tab ID, page title, page URL & the tab's process ID) - press Tab - menu is populated with results - cycle through them using Tab/Shift+Tab - press Enter to jump to it. Similar workflow for history, different bookmark types, etc. History can also be loaded as an HTML page and jumped through with regex, etc. If you want to stick with

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.

that exactly how the Greek word sounds :)

ιστορία, if you wanna copy paste.

and yes, the English word comes from the Greek word!

Nothing stopping them from threatening an open-source dev. The ""recent"" incident of Hoarder rebranding to Karakeep comes to mind.

Thanks for answering. Do you think these dovetail? Both archive everything you browse, so that's common functionality that could be factored out. I only want one archive, having two separate archives because one focuses on search and the other on long term archival is inefficient. What do you do for long term archival - or do you not have this use case?

"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

I built something similar at the start of the year, using tailscale for auth (multi user on my tailnet/home network) and for access wherever I was, whether at home or on the road (all compute/storage was on my Mac mini.) Worked a treat.

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.

What about Krionicle? References Chronological Chronicle, cryo- (freezing knowledge for later use), and a robotic toy from 2001

Unless you are really strapped for cash, register all the candidates before you start that voting.

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.

Oh, I haven't considered the possibility of indexing things like Instagram or Discord with this. I am now much more interested than before

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

We have a `yt-dlp` based extractor that can fetch the subtitles/transcripts from the sites `yt-dlp` supports: https://hister.org/docs/extractors#ytdlp

May I suggest Yahoox!

Been using hister for a number of weeks now; i'm coming across sites whose content would be better handled with a custom extractor; but it looks like extractors need to be bundled into the build in order to work? Is that correct?

Put another way, i can't write an extractor for Reuters and then point a config to it from my current hister binary?

That's a good call out but it is something I tested originally and ruled out.

I've got some applications used daily by friends all over the world and the services would all become unavailable to them when this started happening. Only fix I found was restarting NGINX service and then it could happen again an hour later or 3 days later. Once I removed the proxy config for Hister from the service, the issue never happened again.

I'll repro the issue and get the details intoa. Github Issue this weekend.

Yes, I should have some time this weekend to reproduce the problem and provide useful information for ya'll to look at...even if it's just to determine the problem is for me to fix and not a bug with Hister.

histsearch

Regarding the name, how about Ascimo or Askimo? :)

Whatever you do, try not to chose a name which collides with nostrodamus' predictions about .. (ok, he actually used "Hister" to refer to the Danube it seems, but popular legend has another take which is .. unfortunate)

I will definitely try this in my home-lab!

And for the name, what about "Historex" (although already taken as well) o "Histearch", mesh-up of "history" and "search"?

My suggestion is Lookdown. Kind of a play on words reminiscent of Markup/Markdown --> Lookup/Lookdown. But also a lookdown is a distinctive looking fish with a cute concave profile so you've got an instant mascot.

Call your project hipster. Just a one letter change ;-)

Embarrassing for them that their lawyers don't understand even the basics of trademark law

Or more likely do, but hope that you don't...

Not a Lawyer, but Hister is a common, old word. Unless you're in the same business as the trademark holder, I would think you have grounds to continue? I note you have the domain name registered, and any deep-pocketed hostile trademark owner would already have reclaimed that. Unfortunately, legal advice is expensive, and the system is open to abuse.

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....

When designing a standard like this you need to apply systems thinking.

The poor data quality is a problem for anyone who wants to use the tags, which has seen everyone almost universally reaching for other solutions. Search engines have preferred anchor tags, bookmarking solutions have applied user tagging.

With keyword tags it's been a vicious circle of poor data quality and neglect since day one. Even in documents from the early 1990s when people were really trying, the data quality is inconsistent at best.

Did irrelevant keywords ever work for the spammer? You could add "naked" as a keyword because it had a lot of searches compared to "compiler". Now what happened to those looking for naked cats when they got to your website about code compilation. It's not like they would stop and think "oohh I'll look at this instead"

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.

Yes, but that's a solution for the stuff you consciously save. While this is a solution for stuff you see but decide it was interesting weeks after you closed that tab and you only have a vague memory of what it was about.

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?

Not very practical for a solution that requires a browser plugin. The browser is where most of my interesting data is.

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?

...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.

We should be doing this with all software, regardless of provenance, anyway. Least privilege applies to servers just as much as it does to users. Even if the software isn't untrustworthy you can be it has vulnerabilities.

My first go-to is network segmentation because I spend most of my time doing networking work. For every vendor who has shit-talked me to Customers ("Wah, wah! Your networking vendor is making this so much harder because they want us to enumerate our traffic!") I have concrete examples I can cite when attacks were stopped by network segmentation (preventing shellcode from downloading a payload, preventing C2 communication, firing off alerts when unexpected network traffic starts coming out of a host, etc).

Beyond network segmentation, I am very suspicious of software that needs to run as a privileged user. So many attacks get easier when privilege escalation in the host OS is already done for you.

And it's a proper way to use computer nowadays.

Apart from high-overhead solutions like VMs and containers, there are seamless and maintenance-free solutions (after the initial setup):

- systemd service hardening [0] [1]

pretty powerful, but it's a blacklist approach - whack-a-mole

- AppArmor [2]

Whitelist, proactive approach. Contrary to SElinux, it's not a programming language, and could be grasped pretty quickly. I made a tool to easily convert AA logs into usable rules. [3]

[0] https://github.com/alegrey91/systemd-service-hardening

[1] https://github.com/desbma/shh

[2] https://presentations.nordisch.org/apparmor/

[3] https://github.com/nobody43/apparmor-suggest

How do other people handle this dilemma?

For me: consider this a form of paranoia and ignore it, while worrying more about cleanup costs of non-vetted packages.

Like, even if there is 5% chance that a program I download will start downloading global python or node packages, odds are within a year I'll deal with couple that have mutually incompatible requirements and are impossible to run without more VM surgery than I have patience for, and that I'll discover this only after a botched installation bricks software that used to work before.

But that's solvable with less extra work. Just throwaway containers. With no hand-wringing about read-only access or isolating it from network, because my threat modeling doesn't consider loss of privacy or any data leak from my personal local side to be realistic or impactful threat event (I mean, everything that matters is in someone else's cloud and by design not trivial to access) - OTOH, it assigns great magnitudes to loss of personal time.

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...

It doesn't work well with assets served via CDN, for example.

I don't want to have separate directories. I want a single easily shareable and copyable file. The file that can be opened anywhere in the future.

If you check what kind of stuff SingleFile does, you will find a list of things Firefox is not doing.

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

Agree on this. There area lots of links I click and immediately close, because I immediately recognize it's AI Slop for instance. No need to register these type of stuff immediately to the hister database.

Adding a timer constraint would be really nice and I guess it might be quite easy to do it since it's only a concern in the browser extension.

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

I've been using Hister for over 2 weeks. So far, so good. I really like the interface, the search, everything. Thank you!

Completely random but o remember reading back in the day that Nostradamus had predicted the rise of a Hitler like figure except he had named a Hister, not the actual.

https://www.history.co.uk/articles/did-nostradamus-really-pr...

Hi, was wondering if you would be alright with a github set private fork done by someone else if they got bored and wanted to add some private features? Thanks. Now back to my steak frites! :9

I was just thinking about a tool like this this morning.

Great product concept. I explored this some time ago and created a browser extension product. Check it out.

https://stashpad.ai/

The local file indexing sounds useful. Often forget where I saved that important PDF and Spotlight fails me.

I can see using this to index the thousands of bookmarks I have and my every growing reading list and see if my local model and find a pattern and/or help surface anything interesting related to the papers I read

Opera browser has this feature baked in a long time ago, before the Chromium era.

This is pretty useful, actually. I’ve been using it for the past 2–3 days, and I didn’t find it through YC Hacker News but through some other channel. It’s great to see that so many other people are already using it and praising it—congrats on that!

One of the most useful use cases for me, especially since I work in GTM, is keeping track of new ways to get replies from prospects, whether through cold outbound or things like SEO/GEO optimization. I read at least 2-3 articles a day on this, and it genuinely helps me figure out which ideas are worth trying because I can now keep track of everything I’ve read.

Is the plugin compatible with Brave?

I use Hister as my default search engine. I’m quite happy with it. If I know I need to branch out, I use the double-bang before my query “!! Hacker News Fujitsu” and it kicks straight to the configured search engine (Kagi in my case).

Wtf with everyone suggesting new names? Is this an LLM thing?

Do you have thoughts on the prospects for inter-operation between the "recoll" application and hister? Like, maybe an adapter that let's hister read recoll's xapian database/index? Or, a tool that converts/syncs beween hister's store and recoll's?

I use Betula (https://codeberg.org/bouncepaw/betula/) for this purpose of a self-hosted personal Google (for websites).

(For file search, I use voidtools' Everything, and I'm not sure why anyone other than Microsoft would want to mix local file results and web results)

This project looks cool, though I misread the name as "Hipster" initially [sips almond milk macha coffee]

I used to use it, but it would use a lot of CPU and hurt battery life, is the idea that you self host on a different machine?

My issue with this is that as I had my notes that I curated there was never return on investment for doing that.

Running this would be nice but it still takes time and still there is no ROI for me.

Of course there will be people who find it useful but I am pretty much done with building knowledge bases or having todo lists.

Stuff that I need to do or remember - everything else if I forget nothing happens and it doesn’t impact my life or work.

It would be nice if it could also search through emails. I'm using emails to myself often as notes and bookmarks. Would be nice if they could be included in the search index.

Can you please not post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to HN? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.

Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.

I've been using histre.com for years, which builds a personal search engine for the pages you visit by adding a browser extension. It's freed me from the habit of compulsively bookmarking everything in case I might need it again. I also keep a local text index for grepping which is plenty fast even with years of history and ripgrep, and comes in handy often.

Can Hister handle indexing of large local file shares? I've got 30-50TB of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files with no easy way to search them currently, beyond Agent Ransack.

Does Hister handle this well? If not, can anyone suggest other options?

I just wanted to say thank you for not letting the LLM write the README.md for you n