Hister
fast, content-based search for visited websites
Details
- External ID
- 46901321
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Hister
- Website domain
- hister.org
- Launched
- Feb. 5, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 9
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.4865229110512129
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I'm working on a self-hosted search service called Hister with the goal to reduce my dependence on online search engines.Hister is basically 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 more than a month now and as my local index is growing I can avoid opening google/duckduckgo more and more frequently.The project is still heavily under development with constant fine-tuning, 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
Enrichment
- Theme
- system maintenance and file utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Search & retrieval
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- search engine for your browsing history
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It is a standard self-hosted application consisting of a browser extension capturing DOM content, a full-text search backend (e.g. SQLite FTS5 or Tantivy), and a simple search UI/CLI.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Google Search
Concerns raised: Google Search quality degradation
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 15 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #8 of 16 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 90 days after the earliest competitor.
- Google Indexer · ph · 2026-09-29 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Indexing Url: link instant indexer tools · ph · 2026-09-20 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- I built a search engine for all domains on the internet · hn · 2025-11-07 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Semsearch · hn · 2026-08-03 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- Semantic search over Hacker News, built on pgvector · hn · 2026-02-22 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- Partial content web crawling using HTTP/2 and Go · hn · 2026-01-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- Mantic.sh · hn · 2026-01-06 · 81 upvotes · similarity 0.32
- Best Bookmark · ph · 2026-09-25 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.32
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.