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).
Interesting, I didn’t see it in the documentation so if you didn’t document that already, you can have your local instance as search suggestion for Firefox on mobile and desktop. I use it for my own wiki, e.g. https://mastodon.pirateparty.be/@utopiah/116351732150481942
Also how I would imagine it is default search there and if no hit then fallback to a default search engine, e.g. DDG.
This is exactly how I use it. Hister has even a hotkey to quickly jump to your preferred online search engine with the current search query if you cannot find what you are looking for.