asciimoo
Adam Tauber (GitHub handle: asciimoo) is an independent open-source software developer and creator whose work focuses on privacy-respecting search, web crawling, content preservation, and developer tools. His current Hister project aims to reduce dependence on untrusted search services by giving people a private, self-hosted full-content search index of pages and files they choose to keep.
At a Glance
AI Tools by asciimoo
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Hister
Self Hosted Personal Search Engine
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Latest News
Hister v0.20.0 released with bookmark and Raindrop.io imports, continuous file imports, diagnostics/configuration commands, allow rules, structured output, Prometheus metrics, and Unix sockets.
Hister was featured on Hacker News; Tauber described it as a different approach from Searx, based on a personal index of visited pages, bookmarks, history, local files, and crawled sites, with full-text/semantic search, offline previews, CLI, web UI, and MCP.
Hister v0.19.0 released with ChatGPT and Hacker News extractors, URL regex search, Safari history imports, and richer terminal/search previews.
Hister v0.18.0 released with search suggestions, social/discussion extractors, local document imports, service/browser imports, history timelines, and structured MCP results.
Products & Services
AGPLv3, self-hosted personal search engine for the full content of visited pages, browser history, bookmarks, local files, and crawled websites. It provides web, terminal, HTTP API, CLI, and MCP access; stores extracted content for offline previews; and can run locally or on infrastructure controlled by the user.
Privacy-respecting metasearch engine; Tauber's first free-software search project and a predecessor in his search-related work.
Elegant scraping and crawling framework for Go, maintained under the gocolly organization.
Web content preservation service.
Market Position
Tauber positions Hister as a complement to—not a replacement for—general discovery engines such as Google: it specializes in private recall search over a user's own pages and files. Its differentiators are self-hosting, no telemetry or mandatory cloud, access to authenticated content, automatic browser capture, full-text indexing, and offline previews. In his comparison, browser history, Evernote/Notion-style clippers, and curated preservation tools such as Omnom each lacked some combination of automatic capture, full-text search, speed, privacy, and comprehensive history coverage.
Leadership
Founders
Adam Tauber
Independent open-source developer and author/maintainer of Hister, Searx, Colly, and other projects; his GitHub profile identifies him as based in Budapest, Hungary.
Founding Story
Tauber says he started Hister after realizing that much of his daily Google use was recall search—trying to refind pages he had already visited, including authenticated or private content that Google could not index. Existing browser history, web clippers, and personal knowledge tools did not combine automatic capture, full-text search, speed, privacy, authentication-aware indexing, and offline previews, so he built Hister as a self-hosted personal search engine. After six weeks of use, he reported that roughly 50% of his Google searches were answered locally.
Target Markets
- Recall search for refinding information already encountered
- Private personal knowledge bases for developers, researchers, and knowledge workers
- Searching authenticated pages, internal tools, private repositories, and private networks
- Preserving readable copies when original pages change, disappear, or go offline
- Threat-intelligence and cybersecurity research workflows
- AI assistant retrieval through MCP
- Cyberbro, an open-source observables-analysis project, documents an integration with Hister's search API for threat-intelligence workflows.