semtex

semtex is semtantic search for your desktop. Fully offline and private.

Install

WARNING: semtex is alpha-quality software (on a good day). Any data stored may get lost or be corrupted.

• Download and run the desktop application (currently Linux only).

• Install the browser extension. Currently, this is only supported on browsers which allow you to install unsigned extensions (e.g. Firefox Nightly).

What is it?

• a rust-based backend to index text into a local vector index (usearch) and database (sqlite)
• a browser extension which tracks local browsing activity;
• a desktop application to search and manage your data.

How does it work?

semtex's browser extension inspects the content of each page you visit and determines whether it appears to be article-like text. It uses Mozilla's Readability library to transform websites into plain text and sends these (via localhost) to the desktop application.

The desktop application receives these text snippets and:

• stores them in a local sqlite database;
• transforms them into a vector embedding representation (using MiniLM-L12-v2);
• writes the embeddings to a local vector database (usearch).

The embedding model used has been chosen to work well without GPU acceleration.

To search your browing history, open up the desktop app and type a free-form semantic search query. This will similarly be converted to a text embedding and then used to search the local vector index and sqlite database.

Credits

semtex is an open source project built by Scalar. We are experts in building LLM-powered data processing and search systems. Get in touch hello@scalar.dev.