Personally, things have been hectic to say the least. Whenever I have a stressful period in my life I find a random little hobby to keep me going. It's never intentional, but it always happens. This time it's homelabbing. My old laptop (one of those x360 convertibles from HP) is sitting under the TV slowly degrading its battery as I watch "Game Of Thrones" streamed directly from its external hard drive. It has been so much fun seeing what I can throw on it. I feel a bit like those millennials who got high on #vanlife in the 2010s. I'm wringing together an assortment of equipment I have on hand to create a digital home that I can truly call my own. I won't bore you with the details (unless you're my boyfriend, in that case I've been yapping about all that continuously for the past few months to you. I love you <3) but I've gotta talk about one cool project I found.

There are three big tech companies whose products I use that feel especially yucky to me – Facebook, Microsoft and Google. If I can, I try to avoid them as much as possible. While I can't delete my college-issued Microsoft email or the Facebook account I own to talk to my classmates...I can try to degoogle. There couldn't have been a better time to attempt this as recently I came across Adam Tauber's (asciimoo) newest project on Privacy Guides - Hister.

While the UI does look vibecoded and AI features like MCP aren't for me the whole package is really unique. I don't think I've seen a fully selfhosted search engine before. There is SearchXNG, but as far as I can tell it's only an intermediary between you and multiple public search engine with no local webiste index. Hister is fully local. After you set it up (my preferred way was through Docker Compose) you're greeted with a page that looks roughly like this: which feels like the googly home I'm used to. The difference being that you're the one who indexes pages that land inside Hister's database. You can use a crawler like the big boys of search engine world or use the official browser extension to save every page you visit. This makes Hister's search index truly unique and suited to you...with the downside that there now exists a machine out there that stores your browser history. That is a little bit of a risk obviously but you can mitigate it by setting good rules to exclude certain urls from being indexed and using a separate browser profile for more sensitive websites. It would be nice to see Hister's devs look into ways to store the database in an encrypted form though which might be on the docket if I remember correctly.

Hister's development is still in early stages as far as I can tell but the program already show much promise. Having a local, personal index has been quite useful already, even if my index is still small at around 3k pages. For example I've crawled my local municipal transport agency's site so whenever I search up a stop name like "Mączna" I get the newest departures from that stop and not random websites about bread or streets on the other side of the country. A small index is both a curse and a blessing. At worst, when Hister has nothing to show you it'll redirect you to your public search provider of choice, at best it'll show you results no Google, Duck or Bing would ever show you because of SEO.