How do other people handle this dilemma?
Even solution I can think of involves are a great amount of extra work.
I have it up on GitHub, but I don't think anyone should use my implementation.
Loosely, what I built:
* On each of my machines I have a cron job running that looks at all my web browser history (usualy it's inspecting the brower's SQLlite across firefox and chrome). If it matches my rule list: hacker news stories, certain reddits, etc. it'll grab the page, convert to markdown and drop in my Obsidian Vault incoming.
* It has a whole de-duping architecture since I might open the same page on multiple machines. Uses the CloudFlare SQLITE D1 storage for tracking the processed links.
* it'll then trigger the LLM to do some Karpathy wiki style taxonomy assignment to the articles, organize them, create an index etc.
It's then available for my "bot" stuff to do writings for me.... I will probably write more about it at some point. I'm not certain it's totally useful and not just a yak-shave on hoarding knowledge.
Ai-drafted article on this [1]
Example AI-Drafted article based on some discussions the other day on Ollma vs LLama.cpp [2]
[1] https://taude.xyz/posts/how-archivore-turns-browsing-into-a-...
[2] https://taude.xyz/posts/skip-ollama-run-llama-cpp-directly-o...
I think browsers can play a part in building a local search index for URLs based on those keywords the page declares and cross verify/accept only those that are in prominently visible content, or may be delegate to an external engine(like LLMs) via an extension etc. This is particularly useful for cases where full text indexing is not feasible or desirable.
I doubt Google will ever add such feature in chrome though.
As far as the need for private search, well, I've already searched for or visited those pages, so...
The biggest win was the realization that both firefox and chrome maintain all the links you visit in a very queryable SQLite database. I've been poking at that for a lot of custom tools, like WHAT JIRA tickets am I paying attention to this week, etc....
Hister builds a personal search index from pages you visit, bookmarks, browser history, local files, and crawled websites. It stores extracted content with offline result previews, so information remains searchable even when the original page changes or disappears. It supports full text and semantic search, can run entirely on your own machine, and includes a web interface, command line tools, and an MCP endpoint for assistant integrations.
Website: https://hister.org/
Tiny read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/
Ps.: It looks like our name conflicts with a registered trademark in the US. The owner of the other project has asked us to change it, so we’ll probably need to comply sooner or later.
Name suggestions are welcome! Ideally, the new name should be relatively short, sound good, and have an available .org domain.
Thanks!
Nobody seems to remember it, even though it was a headline feature. Was removed in 2013, I think due to technical constraints.
Will definitely try this.
Edit: Found it. Thanks Claude.
https://github.com/ssnangua/google-chrome-comic-hd/blob/main...
https://dfir.blog/history-index-files-removed-from-chrome-v3...
I think due to shareholders wanting new sportcars. The offline pages don't show Google Ads.
Every single web page I’ve found interesting, since the advent of the Web, I have printed to PDF and stored locally for my own personal reference.
Something like 80,000+ files - my own copy of my own Internet - indexable, searchable.
Available offline. Something to read when I am far out to sea.
There is no need to involve third parties in your Internet history - no matter how trustworthy they seem to want to appear.
Print to PDF, and you’ve got everything you need, safe and sound.
The more "modern" the site, the worse it is. Surprisingly, government websites often print correctly since they've done the least amount of work to make the site modern looking.
This has an MCP server specifically so a workflow like that would work for you. This is just made to gold the data, and I'm a human accessible way should your AI fail you
You didn't solve the problem, you are just trading pain points.
[1] https://git.brucewillis.sexy/~tombert/fs_index I promise, safe for work, despite the URL.
I like the search ui. my projects become functional but never polished. https://github.com/sbeckeriv/memoir
Is there any site/project that works as a fully customizable personal front-end to all other SERPs?
When I search for something, I always want a link to the best Wikipedia result. This should always be in the same place and have a giant icon/picture.
Then there could be easily clickable links to the SERP pages for Google, DDG, etc. for that query.
A big link to route it to your favorite LLM.
Seems like you could have a really useful "homepage" for all searches that sat in front of all the other sites. It could be local only and would not require indexing the web. Also wouldn't be a files search thing, as Hister appears to be.
It's badly needed, and so far it's working well for me.
Histeri
MyHister(i)
Hyster(y)
What does Hister do differently? Search seems like a major differentiator, I'm wondering if leveraging the existing archivebox project for archival and implementing good search on top would be more efficient
Edit: I RTFD - and it seems yes.
