Hister
Personal web search engine with automatic indexing of visited websites. Supports offline local result previews, local files, multi-user handling and optional semantic search.
Actively maintained with regular releases.
Commit activity more than 87% of tracked projects; popularity more than 69%. How this is calculated.
Commits, last 11 months
| Stars | 5.8k |
|---|---|
| Latest release | rolling · 23 Feb 2026 |
| Repo updated | 27 Sept 2026 |
| Licence | AGPL-3.0 |
| Built with | Go, Docker |
Is Hister actively maintained?
Over the last 11 months the project absorbed 1637 commits, of which 674 arrived in the most recent quarter — roughly 225 commits a month.
The most recent tagged release, rolling, is about 7 months old.
Hister ranks #6 of 16 in Search Engines, placing it mid-table for maintenance activity.
What Hister actually does
Hister is a self-hosted personal search engine that automatically indexes websites you visit. It provides local file support, offline result previews, and optional semantic search capabilities for multiple users.
Best fit: Users who want a private, locally indexed history of their web browsing and personal files that can be searched quickly without relying on external cloud services.
Worth knowing: The AGPL-3.0 licence requires you to release the source code of any modified versions if you host it as a network service. It also relies on continuous background indexing, which may increase disk I/O and storage requirements over time.
Deployment notes
As a containerised Go application, you will typically need to configure persistent volumes for the index data and place it behind a reverse proxy to handle TLS termination.
Hister as a replacement for
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