Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Hister: self-hosted search engine for webpages and files with offline result preview (github.com)

submitted 3 days ago by asciimoo@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm working on a self-hosted search service called Hister with the goal to reduce my dependence on online search engines.

Hister is a full text indexer for websites which saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface & query language to explore previously visited content with ease or quickly fall back to traditional search engines.

I've been using it for a few months and as my local index is growing I can avoid opening google/duckduckgo/kagi more and more frequently.

The project is still heavily under development with a growing community, but the current version is in a fairly usable state in my opinion, so I wanted to share it here - perhaps some of you find it useful as well. (Or at least have some constructive criticism =])

The code is AGPLv3 licensed, available at https://github.com/asciimoo/hister website: https://hister.org/ read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/

About me: I develop privacy protecting and data liberating free software since 2008. I'm the author of Searx, Colly (https://github.com/gocolly/colly) and many more smaller free software/self-hosted projects (https://github.com/asciimoo).

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[–] asciimoo@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It indexes pages which were already visited, right?

Yes, if you use the browser extension only, but Hister has an API and a crawler as well if you'd like to add content you have not visited yet. Also, Hister supports indexing local text files, not just websites.

Afterwards, that website is in my browsing history and if I need it again, I don’t need to search for it

Unfortunately browser history does not include the page's content only the URL + title combo at best.
Browser's can't show an offline preview (Having offline previews is a huge privacy - and productivity - win in my opinion, it completely eliminates the need of creating external network requests)

These are the biggest weaknesses of the browser history compared to Hister, but there are many more nuances where Hister can provide extra features and QoL improvements. I recommend checking the documentation & posts on the website if you are interested in the details.

[–] ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

So does that mean that the index starts off as empty? If so, is there a way to create a centralized (I know that's a bad word) starting repo such that the engine already knows some cool results? I have tabbed bookmarks for news that is not shitty, archives, video that isn't YouTube, privacy resources, etc. It would be cool if people could post indices focused on certain topics that they could add. Like indices for random stuff, like dog grooming, kayaking, or woodworking. It could be a hub like Docker Hub, but for cool results.

Sorry. Ha ha. You know you have a good idea when people start asking for features. I haven't even started it yet. Maybe I can try self hosting on my desktop.

This is exciting! I normally use Searxist on Android.

[–] asciimoo@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 days ago

I'd absolutely love to do this! It's already on my future plans list: https://hister.org/support :

Create infrastructure for importable, pre-indexed databases organized by topic, letting users quickly expand their local index with curated, relevant content.

It could be a hub like Docker Hub, but for cool results.

Exactly!

Sorry. Ha ha. You know you have a good idea when people start asking for features. I haven’t even started it yet.

<3 No need to apologize. I appreciate suggestions a lot (especially if those are well aligned with my ideas =] ).