hister

Hister is a self-hosted personal search engine that indexes full page contents and local files so users can find information they've seen before from a web UI, terminal UI, CLI, or via an AI assistant through MCP. It provides a quickstart workflow: download a platform binary, run "hister listen" to start a local server, open the web UI and install a browser extension to capture visited pages. It also supports importing browser history, crawling sites, and indexing local directories. Query functionality includes field filters, phrases, wildcards, negation, aliases and result prioritization, and an optional semantic search mode that uses an embeddings endpoint you configure.

Privacy and deployment are central: by default there is no telemetry or mandatory cloud sync and all content is stored on the server you control; semantic embeddings are only sent to services you explicitly configure. Multi-user operation keeps each user’s documents separate on a shared server. Install options include binaries, Homebrew, Docker and Nix. Development requires Go 1.26, npm and a C compiler for CGO; contributors can build locally with provided scripts and run a Vite-based hot-reload web app. The project is open-source under AGPLv3 and has an active community and documentation.