Hister indexes every web page I visit and lets me search the full text of my browsing history offline

Patrick is a seasoned writer with more than a decade of experience, specializing in any and all things tech. His work has been featured on platforms like CNET, Yahoo, Xfinity, and many other outlets. When not typing away, he can be found with his nose in a book. 

Have you ever wished your browser history was more than just a collection of URLs? As it is, the standard search history is kind of useless. Sure, you can see the title of the page you visited, maybe a bit of metadata, but not much more than that. For any actual functionality, like searching for a specific page you visited that you can't quite remember the name of, your browser's built-in history search falls flat on its face (like my six-month-old did as I was writing this sentence).

That's where Hister comes in. This open-source, self-hosted tool does more than just track your activity; it indexes every site you visit, capturing the contents of the page for easy search and retrieval later.

Your web history stays local

The data doesn't leave your machine

Google might be the most powerful search engine around, but it turns the user into a commodity. It's no coincidence that you start seeing ads for things you've searched for. With Hister, your indexed activity lives on your machine in a specific configuration file, and it runs as a Go binary on a browser extension for Chrome or Firefox. Sure, there are extensions that offer the same functionality as Hister, but the trade-off is the same. Your data is traded in exchange for the feature.

Hister gives you all the benefits with none of the downsides, although it doesn't help the telemetry your browser collects.

Full-text search is a much better approach

You can search what you read, not where you went

When I'm deep in my research, I sometimes read a couple of dozen sites at a time. I might not remember all of them, especially if I'm skimming for information. Hister's full-text search lets me seek out specific words or phrases rather than just the website title. And it's more than just a simple search. Hister is built on blevesearch, a search library also written in Go. It allows for users to input multiple different field types for more powerful search functionality, like boolean functions, fuzzy matching, and more.

There's another, often-overlooked benefit to Hister. It indexes the pages as they were when you visited them. Websites change over time; data is removed, things are updated. If you're looking for something extremely specific, Hister will have it cataloged in a way that a typical search engine won't be able to match.

Hister is relatively easy to install, even if you aren't tech savvy

You can have it running in four steps

The main barrier to entry for self-hosted applications is that they can be intimidating to users who aren't as comfortable performing more advanced operations on their computer. Hister is simple to install, too. Just look for the releases page on GitHub, then download the correct version for your OS. After that, all you need to do is run it and install the proper add-on, and you can access your search history with ease.

Here's a trick: you don't have to start from scratch. You can use the command hister import to port your existing Chrome or Firefox history, while the blacklist config lets you select domains that shouldn't be indexed (like banking sites, medical portals, etc.)

Hister is still relatively new

As far as self-hosted apps go, Hister has a lot to prove yet. It only launched in January of this year, so it's barely three months old. Beyond that, there's only a single developer (although it is growing in popularity with each day, and has already been forked 20 times). If the developer gets bored with Hister (and no one else picks up the project), then it could be dead in the water. For users that want something with a proven track record, Hister's young age could be a deal breaker. On the other hand, it means the app can grow a lot more in the future.

The growing popularity means it's likely to stick around

While new open-source software is always a risk to use (largely due to the risk of abandonment as opposed to security vulnerabilities), the fact that Hister has already been forked 20 times in just a few months is a great sign. It means the community is invested in the application and wants to see it succeed, and that other developers are already working on adapting it to individual use-cases. Because Hister is open-source, the code will live on even if the developer scraps the project.

Your memory is fuzzy, but your index doesn't have to be

My memory isn't what it used to be (especially with the sleep patterns of early parenthood), but that's the perk of working on a digital medium: silicon is much better at storing and remembering things than gray matter. Hister makes it easy to review my search history, and it makes it a lot easier to find that one page I have a vague memory of visiting.