Hister: Open-source personal search engine for your browsing history and files
Original: Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep
Why This Matters
Growing demand for local-first, privacy-preserving tools is pushing personal search infrastructure into developer toolkits.
Hister is an open-source, self-hosted search engine that indexes the full text of pages you visit and local files you store. It exposes results via a web UI, terminal, or AI assistant via MCP. The project has 4,300+ GitHub stars.
Hister, released under the AGPL-3.0 license by GitHub user asciimoo, is a self-hosted search engine designed around privacy. Rather than indexing the open web, it indexes the specific pages you visit and files you keep locally — storing everything on your own machine. Results are accessible through a web interface, a terminal, or an AI assistant connected via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The project has accumulated over 4,300 stars and 189 forks on GitHub, with 2,100+ commits indicating active development. Hister is written in Go, ships as a single binary, and supports Docker deployment via an included compose.yml. A Nix flake is also provided. The tool fills a gap that browser history search and desktop search apps like macOS Spotlight or Windows Search have long left open: full-text retrieval across both web content and local files in one interface, without sending data to third-party servers.