Hey everyone, I built a Search and Similar Notes plugin if anyone would find it helpful.
I’m a fairly straightforward user of Obsidian. I have lots of notes which I don’t really organize, I kind of trust that I’ll find them later when needed. The issue is that sometimes I’m searching for a word that has a similar meaning, or because I forgot the exact word I just want to find it. Or if I have a note open I want to see if there’s something similar in my vault.
I also don’t like the idea of needing API keys, or creating accounts, or having bloated software doing this. It’s a fairly straightforward mathematical task. For me it should be simple: search by keyword + meaning, and show notes similar in meaning to whatever I’m reading.
So I built a plugin that does that. No API key, no account, no cloud, no setup. Install it and it works. One of my use cases is i write a blog using Zola, which is markdown files, i like having a small vault for that to see similar things i’ve written before, and search across posts without remembering exact titles
Search - combines keyword matching with meaning-based matching. A second pass then refines the ranking so the best results float to the top.
Related notes - Zola blog post and related notes
It runs two small models locally (22MB each, download once on first launch). Indexing runs in web workers Only changed files get re-indexed on restart. Your notes never leave your machine.
This is the very first release so expect some rough edges. First time indexing can be slow depending on vault size, but after that it’s incremental and only re-indexes files that changed. I’ve tested on vaults up to around 5,000 notes(it took all night to index but its a one off). If you have a larger vault I’d be curious to hear how it goes.
Free and MIT licensed. No Pro tier, no paywall.
Install via BRAT with: github olafurjohannsson/kjarni-obsidian
First public release, happy to hear feedback.