I have also been surprised that personal search engines are not a solved problem. “We” have actually known how to do decent search for a long time, including across images and the entire freaking internet for over two decades, but it’s not simple or commonplace to get a good semantic search interface for your own files, local or remote.

Chrome currently offers a semantic search across your browser history, but it’s buried. The major photo services allow for search across your photos. Windows and Mac have indexed keyword search across files, but the interface feels primitive.

I increasingly want a private search index across my browsing history, my photos, my notes/files, my voice recordings, GitHub projects, etc.

I thought a paid personalizable search engine like Kagi would be a good place to get/build a personalized internet search index on my browser history, but they don’t really offer the tools for that scale.

There are some enterprise search engines trying to solve this for orgs, so maybe I should be looking there?

I’m glad to see projects like Hachi, and am curious what others are doing or reaching for.