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Hister private search index
Archived — this story has rotated out of today’s deck. It is kept here in full.
The gist
Hister launched a private, self-hosted search index for personal content. It addresses growing privacy concerns over cloud search engines.
Background
Hister is a free, open-source search engine that indexes your entire digital life—browsing history, local files, and even entire websites. It offers full-text and semantic search, a built-in crawler with browser backends for JavaScript-heavy pages, and an MCP server so AI assistants can query your personal index. With a focus on privacy, it's fully self-hosted with no telemetry or cloud sync.
How it unfolded
- Aug 18, 2026Hister was featured on Zeli.app as a private, self-hosted search engine.
- Aug 21, 2026Hister appeared on Hacker News as a private, self-hosted search engine.
- Aug 23, 2026Hister trended on Hacker News and was shared on X and Instagram, gaining attention.
Who’s saying what
- Support
- Users appreciate Hister's passive indexing and privacy-focused design, with one user noting it addresses the issue of forgetting to save bookmarks.