Semantic search on your device

The site’s search matches the words you type. This experiment matches meaning: type “instruments that listen” and it can find a project about machine listening even if neither word appears. It works by turning every item on the site into a list of numbers at build time, doing the same to your query in your browser, and comparing the two. Nothing you type is sent anywhere; the only download is the model, about 30 MB, fetched once on first use and kept by your browser.

Search by meaning

The model loads when you search for the first time.

What to compare

Try the same query in the keyword search. The keyword search is exact and fast and needs no model; the semantic search finds paraphrases and related ideas, including across English and Norwegian, and ranks by similarity, so the last results are weak matches rather than no matches. Both use the same index, built from the site’s pages at every deployment.

Where this leads

The same on-device retrieval can feed a question-answering assistant that cites the pages it draws on, without a server and without logging, which is the direction discussed for the chat page. What is measured here first is whether the download and the computation are acceptable on an ordinary laptop and phone.