Histiq Reviews and Details

Questions & Answers

1. What makes Histiq unique?

   Histiq searches your browser history and PDFs by meaning, and it does the whole thing on your device. Most tools that search page content send your history to a server to do it. Histiq runs a small AI model locally in the browser, so nothing is uploaded, and you can verify that in DevTools. It is the combination of real semantic search and true privacy that sets it apart.

2. Why should a person choose Histiq over its competitors?

   Two reasons. First, privacy: your browsing history never leaves your machine, with no account and no cloud. Second, it works on what you actually remember. You describe a page in your own words and it finds it, even if the title had none of those words. Tools like Rewind or Recall are powerful but cloud-based or heavy screen recorders. Histiq is a lightweight extension focused on the pages and PDFs you read.

3. How would you describe the primary audience of Histiq?

   People who read a lot in the browser and lose track of it: researchers and students working with papers and PDFs, developers reading docs, writers and analysts, and anyone privacy-conscious who wants content search without handing their history to a server.

4. What's the story behind Histiq?

   I kept losing pages I had read. I would remember what an article was about but not its title, and browser history only matches titles and URLs, so it was no help. I would re-google and rebuild the same answer from scratch. I wanted to search my own history and PDFs by meaning without sending any of it to a server, so I built Histiq to run entirely on-device.

5. Which are the primary technologies used for building Histiq?

   transformers.js and ONNX Runtime (WASM) for on-device embeddings, using a quantized all-MiniLM-L6-v2 model (~22MB). It is a Chrome MV3 extension with a service worker and an offscreen document for the model, IndexedDB for local storage, and cosine similarity for semantic ranking with a keyword-first hybrid search.