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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to I built an AI-Powered semantic search for Mac

After getting frustrated with macOS's Spotlight search, e.g., typing "driver license" doesn't give me anything unless the file name matches exactly, I thought, why not index my entire Documents folder? This way, I can find that one PDF or image buried deep in subfolders using natural language queries. So I built SmartSearch; it uses SentenceTransformers for embeddings and FAISS for fast similarity search. Best of all, it runs locally on your computer. Github: https://github.com/neberej/smart-search/ Demo:…

SmartSearch is an AI-powered semantic search tool for Mac that indexes local files and finds documents using natural language queries rather than exact filename matching. It uses SentenceTransformers and FAISS to… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Local first semantic and hybrid BM25 grep / search tool for use by AI and humans! - GitHub - BeaconBay/ck: Local first semantic and hybrid BM25 grep / search tool for use by AI and humans!

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Deep AI search for every photo and every frame of video in any folder on macOS - allenv0/SCM

    19d ago · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3OA

    Hi HN, I built an open-source AI agent that has already indexed and can search the entire Epstein files, roughly 100M words of publicly released documents. The goal was simple: make a large, messy corpus of PDFs and text files immediately searchable in a precise way, without relying on keyword search or bloated prompts. What it does: - The full dataset is already indexed - You can ask natural language questions - Answers are grounded and include direct references to source documents - Supports both exact text lookup and semantic search Discussion around these files is often fragmented. This…

    Jan 2026 · epstein.trynia.ai · its alternatives →

  4. 4IM

    As a grad student (and an ADHDer), I had trouble doing literature review systematically. To combat this, I made a website that finds similar papers using the meaning of the thing I am looking for. I used MixedBread's [^1] embedding model to generate vectors from the abstracts. I store and search similar vectors using Milvus [^2] and finally use Gradio [^3] to serve the frontend. I update the vector database weekly by pulling the metadata dataset from Kaggle [^4]. To speed up the search process on my free oracle instance, I binarise the embeddings and use Hamming distance as a metric. I would…

    2024 · papermatch.mitanshu.tech · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    One search across all your local, cloud and app files

    2021 · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Search multiple documents insanely fast

    2017 · pdfsearchapp.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Semantic search for your technical documentation & knowledge

    2023 · gitbook.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Near instant text recognition for Mac!

    2020 · owlocr.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9
    Tidy▲98

    Spotlight returns nothing for words you know are in a scanned document. It is not a bug: a scan has no text layer, so there is nothing to index. How to check, and three ways to make those documents searchable on a Mac.

    Jul 2026 · tidymacapp.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    local-first semantic code search engine. Contribute to kantord/SeaGOAT development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hi HN! I'm Jonathan and I built Hacker Search (https://hackersearch.net), a semantic search engine for Hacker News. Type a keyword or a description of what you're interested in, and you'll get top links from HN surfaced to you along with brief summaries. Unlike HN's otherwise very valuable search feature, Hacker Search doesn't require you to get your keywords exactly right. That's achieved by leveraging OpenAI's latest embedding models alongside more traditional indexes extracted from the scraped and cleaned up contents of the links. I think there are many more interesting things…

    2024 · hackersearch.net · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    I wrote this tool to get familiar with CLIP model, I know many people have written similar tools with CLIP before, but I'm new to machine learning and writing a classic tool helps my study. The unusual thing with my version is, it is in pure Node.js, with the power of node-mlx, a Node.js machine learning framework. The repo in the link is mostly about implementing indexing and CLI, the code of the model implementation lives as a Node.js module: https://github.com/frost-beta/clip . Hope this helps other learners!

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13
    ManePaw▲85

    Find documents on your Mac using natural language

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14SP

    Step into the future with Searchbase Cloud's AI-enhanced search capabilities. Effortless to integrate, intuitive to use, and built for insightful discoveries. Transform your data into action with the smartest search on the market. Join the revolution.

    2024 · searchbase.dev · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Powerful Ctrl+F alternative

    2025 · chromewebstore.google.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Quickly search and find what you need within any PDF

    2023 · pdfquery.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17
    Docu Dig▲126

    AI-DrivenSmart Search for Your Documents

    2024 · docudig.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Blazingly fast semantic search for your codebase

    2024 · marketplace.visualstudio.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Built an automated system to run a deep search of ArXiv and carefully find all the precise papers that exist on a complex topic. It's different from simple RAG because it searches, classifies, and adapts based on relevant papers it uncovers, and then continues until it finds every paper on a topic (trying to mimic the human research process). Benchmarked 10x higher accuracy and total retrieval compared to Google Scholar for a median search (whitepaper on website). Also knows when it is complete, and misses virtually nothing (< 3% or so, once it's converged). Website has a free trial and a…

    2024 · app.undermind.ai · its alternatives →

  20. 20
    Vector▲117

    Intelligent search for macOS

    Dec 2025 · vector.ethanlipnik.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hi HN, I am Anubhav from Ramanlabs. We have been working on a native gui application to allow users to search any video data( mp4, mkv) or video streams (http&#x2F;rtsp) using computer vision. Application is supposed to work like a video player which displays decoded frames and recognizes objects concurrently, making it an interactive experience. It works in super real-time and only expects a quad-core CPU with AVX2 instructions at minimum. Application is free to download (without any signup&#x2F;account). We are only supporting WINDOWS for now [0]. Even though this is a binary application,…

    2022 · ramanlabs.in · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    AI search for PDFs & images. Better than Spotlight.

    Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    An ML-powered cloud platform for text search

    2021 · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Contribute to aws-samples/semantic-search-aws-docs development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →