Hacker News: asciimoo

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep"

asciimoo — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 09:39:18 +0000

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

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep"

asciimoo — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 07:23:47 +0000

I've never experienced/heard similar behavior. Could you open a GitHub issue or join our Discord/IRC to identify the root cause?

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep"

asciimoo — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:52:17 +0000

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.

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep"

asciimoo — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:12:38 +0000

Yes, that's something I'd like to support. The main missing piece for a user-friendly hosting option such as PikaPods is a configuration UI. At the moment, customizing Hister requires editing a configuration file, which isn't practical for this kind of hosted service.

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep"

asciimoo — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:08:59 +0000

The extension captures the content of the opened tabs, it does not create new requests. If you open both, it captures both.

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep"

asciimoo — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:52:44 +0000

This is a great suggestion, thanks! I'll definitely add it to the list of candidates. My plan is to do a vote on our social platforms if we have a few decent candidates.

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep"

asciimoo — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:10:21 +0000

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.

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep"

asciimoo — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:05:36 +0000

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

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep"

asciimoo — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 18:49:21 +0000

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.

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep"

asciimoo — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 18:13:28 +0000

Sure, as long as you (and the browser extension) can reach the server, it can be used from as many machines as you want even in a multi-user setup.

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep"

asciimoo — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 18:11:31 +0000

Unfortunately, it is still considered too similar from a legal standpoint.

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep"

asciimoo — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:56:19 +0000

Ohi, author here! Thanks for posting Hister. Feel free to A.M.A. My first free software search project was Searx, a privacy respecting metasearch engine, but because of the limitations of the metasearch concept, I've decided to take a different approach.

Hister builds a personal search index from pages you visit, bookmarks, browser history, local files, and crawled websites. It stores extracted content with offline result previews, so information remains searchable even when the original page changes or disappears. It supports full text and semantic search, can run entirely on your own machine, and includes a web interface, command line tools, and an MCP endpoint for assistant integrations.

Website: https://hister.org/

Tiny read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/

Ps.: It looks like our name conflicts with a registered trademark in the US. The owner of the other project has asked us to change it, so we’ll probably need to comply sooner or later.

Name suggestions are welcome! Ideally, the new name should be relatively short, sound good, and have an available .org domain.

Thanks!

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister – A private, full content search index that you control"

asciimoo — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 15:26:36 +0000

The name is coming from "HISTory on STERoids". When I checked the name, I found only a beetle and part of the Danube called "Hister".

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister – A private, full content search index that you control"

asciimoo — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:45:32 +0000

The extracted content is stored and displayed as HTML, so converting it to markdown doesn't guarantee lossless transformation. But, the other direction works well: Hister can live track and import markdown files providing full text search and rendered previews for all your files.

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister – A private, full content search index that you control"

asciimoo — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:40:52 +0000

EDIT: I wanted to write "*not* sure" in the previous message.

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister – A private, full content search index that you control"

asciimoo — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 10:03:39 +0000

You can create multiple users for different use-cases. Also, it is possible to automatically assign labels to documents coming from different sources and use these labels to filter results. E.g. using multiple browser profiles where different profiles apply different labels to submitted documents.

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister – A private, full content search index that you control"

asciimoo — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 22:27:22 +0000

> Would Hister be suitable for this?

The indexer it uses (Bleve) can handle millions of records according to their docs, but sure that Hister would be the best choice for this task. I'd probably use Meilisearch (https://www.meilisearch.com/).

> Can it index mbox files?

Not yet.

> Does it have a search API so I can build an MCP server?

It has both search API and MCP server endpoints.

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister – A private, full content search index that you control"

asciimoo — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 21:11:42 +0000

The whole design is created by a main contributor and IIRC the style is called neobrutalism.

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister – A private, full content search index that you control"

asciimoo — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 20:55:35 +0000

It depends on what you consider intense browsing. An indexed document uses about 100KB on average because Hister stores the full original HTML for offline previews. If storage is a concern, you can disable offline previews, reducing the average document size significantly.

New comment by asciimoo in "Hister – A private, full content search index that you control"

asciimoo — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 20:07:31 +0000

The name coming from HISTory on STERoids. When I checked the name I found only a beetle and part of the Danube called "Hister".