Exploring the Hister Personal Search Engine

the Problem

I don’t know about you but one of my biggest frustrations in reading something on the web then, when I want to refer back to it, being unable to locate it again. For example, suppose you were trying to solve a problem in setting up a piece of software. You did your search and found what you think might be a solution. But, to be sure, you wandered off in search of more information. And you closed that tab. “No worries,” you say, “I’ll just look in my browser history.” Except that your browser history doesn’t actually store the history from all of your tabs. Well, crap! Now what. So you spend the next hour trying in vain to remember the search term that got you that specific page.

The Solution

Into this void steps a neat little program called Hister ¹. Hister is a self-hosted search engine that captures your web history and provides a means for searching it all. Rather than searching the entire Internet again, you can focus on the sites you’ve visited.

When you enter a search term in the search box, you’re presented with a list of sites you’ve visited that reference that term (including the content, not just titles!) on the left-hand side of the screen. Using the tab key or arrow buttons you can move down the list and a copy of the page is presented in the right-hand column. If you want to actually visit the site, just hit enter and the highlighted entry will be opened in a new window. Alternately, you click on the title on the highlighted link.

Browser extensions

Hister accomplishes this amazing feat through the use of a browser extension. Bespoke extensions are available for Chrome and Firefox. Safari and others would appear to be out of the mix. But not quite. Edge, Opera, and others are all based on Chromium, which can use the Chrome extensions. While a search of their extensions won’t turn up Hister, it can be installed in any Chromium based browser by visiting the Chrome Web Store. I successfully installed it on both Edge and Opera and they work just fine.

Now, supposedly you can also search your local files, but I haven’t tested that out yet.

How Do you Get Hister?

Hister can be installed on a local machine e.g. your laptop or desktop. Alternately, you can install a docker version on your server which allows your to use the same Hister instance from any machines on your network. You can also install from source, if that’s your jam. Full instructions on obtaining and installing Hister are available on the Hister.com website.

I did initially have a problem using the docker image. The program would index the pages without issue, but I couldn’t get any results when I searched. Turns out I had a typo in the configuration file. Once I fixed that it has worked flawlessly.

Final Thoughts

So far I am loving this service. It’s one I’ve wished I’d had long ago. I can see that it will be increasingly useful as time goes by and I collect more and more sites into the system.

I do plan to try a local install to see how well the local search works. I’d love to be able to search across my NAS files so I may install it on my Truenas server. If I do, I’ll let you know how it goes!