https://hister.org/posts Latest posts from the Hister blog en Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT https://hister.org/posts/give-your-ai-assistant-a-private-memory/ https://hister.org/posts/give-your-ai-assistant-a-private-memory/ Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT Use Hister MCP to let AI assistants search pages you have read, retrieve stored previews, and answer from your own index. https://hister.org/posts/public-search/ https://hister.org/posts/public-search/ Thu, 25 Jun 2026 08:00:00 GMT Public search lets admins run Hister as a public search engine, making shared discovery possible while keeping write access protected. https://hister.org/posts/the-ultimate-way-to-protect-digital-privacy/ https://hister.org/posts/the-ultimate-way-to-protect-digital-privacy/ Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:00:00 GMT The only guaranteed way to preserve your digital privacy requires no special tooling. This post explains why, and offers practical methods to minimize internet exposure. https://hister.org/posts/index-your-documentation/ https://hister.org/posts/index-your-documentation/ Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:00:00 GMT Go documentation, MDN, your project docs, Stack Overflow answers, GitHub issues. A practical guide to turning Hister into a fast offline reference for everything you work with. https://hister.org/posts/lessons-i-learned-from-creating-searx/ https://hister.org/posts/lessons-i-learned-from-creating-searx/ Wed, 20 May 2026 08:00:00 GMT Seven years of maintaining a popular open source metasearch engine taught me a great deal about privacy, community, and the fundamental limits of the metasearch approach. Here is what led me to build Hister. https://hister.org/posts/never-lose-a-toot-again/ https://hister.org/posts/never-lose-a-toot-again/ Sat, 09 May 2026 10:00:00 GMT Mastodon search is limited. Here is how Hister automatically indexes every toot you see and lets you find them in milliseconds. https://hister.org/posts/using-hister-for-threat-intelligence-workflows/ https://hister.org/posts/using-hister-for-threat-intelligence-workflows/ Sat, 02 May 2026 10:37:00 GMT Some feedback on using Hister for Threat Intelligence workflows, with practical tips and lessons learned. https://hister.org/posts/hister-the-most-privacy-respecting-search-engine/ https://hister.org/posts/hister-the-most-privacy-respecting-search-engine/ Thu, 30 Apr 2026 17:00:00 GMT A detailed look at the privacy landscape of web search from big online engines to self-hosted metasearch, and why Hister offers a fundamentally stronger privacy guarantee than any of them. https://hister.org/posts/building-a-personal-knowledge-base/ https://hister.org/posts/building-a-personal-knowledge-base/ Mon, 27 Apr 2026 11:00:00 GMT Hister's crawler turns any website into a searchable part of your personal index. Here is how to build a structured knowledge base from documentation, wikis, and reference sites. https://hister.org/posts/semantic-search/ https://hister.org/posts/semantic-search/ Mon, 20 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT Hister now supports semantic search: an AI-powered layer that understands the meaning behind your query and surfaces relevant pages even when they use completely different words. https://hister.org/posts/extractors-an-ecosystem-for-better-search/ https://hister.org/posts/extractors-an-ecosystem-for-better-search/ Sun, 12 Apr 2026 10:00:00 GMT How Hister extractors turn raw HTML into rich, searchable content and why we need more of them https://hister.org/posts/how-i-use-hister/ https://hister.org/posts/how-i-use-hister/ Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:00 GMT A personal walkthrough of how I maximize productivity and privacy with Hister: instant access via global hotkeys, query aliases, skip rules, pre-indexing reference material, and seamless fallback to external search engines. https://hister.org/posts/data-indexing-in-golang/ https://hister.org/posts/data-indexing-in-golang/ Wed, 18 Mar 2026 14:23:40 GMT A practical guide to fast, content-based document retrieval in Go using Bleve. From simple indexing to custom query languages and performance fine-tuning https://hister.org/posts/indexing-local-files-with-hister/ https://hister.org/posts/indexing-local-files-with-hister/ Sat, 14 Mar 2026 11:49:00 GMT How to search your local documents, notes, and code alongside your browser history with Hister's new file indexing feature https://hister.org/posts/hister-in-selfhosted-newsletter/ https://hister.org/posts/hister-in-selfhosted-newsletter/ Sat, 21 Feb 2026 12:00:01 GMT We're excited to announce that this week Hister got featured in the Self-hosted newsletter! https://hister.org/posts/firefox-extension-ids-the-bad-and-the-ugly/ https://hister.org/posts/firefox-extension-ids-the-bad-and-the-ugly/ Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:27:42 GMT Firefox extensions use unique internal UUIDs per installation instead of static IDs in the Origin HTTP header that creates privacy nightmare and makes CSRF protection harder to implement for extension-to-server communication https://hister.org/posts/how-hister-works/ https://hister.org/posts/how-hister-works/ Tue, 10 Feb 2026 21:57:22 GMT High level explanation about how Hister works by breaking down its four main components https://hister.org/posts/how-i-cut-my-google-search-dependence-in-half/ https://hister.org/posts/how-i-cut-my-google-search-dependence-in-half/ Mon, 09 Feb 2026 10:47:24 GMT I built Hister, a self-hosted web history search tool that indexes visited pages locally. In just 1.5 months, I reduced my reliance on Google Search by 50%