SearchBox is here — private, local-first search for everything on your computer (Windows & Linux)

[Sbussiso]

SearchBox is officially out — a free, open-source search engine for your own computer. It reads inside your files (PDFs, Word docs, spreadsheets, Markdown, images, even ZIP and offline-Wikipedia archives) and finds what you're after in milliseconds, typos and all. Everything runs locally: no account, no cloud, no telemetry — nothing ever leaves your machine.

👉 Try the live interactive demo — it's a working replica of the real app, right in your browser.

What it does

• Search everything — full-text, typo-tolerant search across folders you point it at, powered by an embedded Meilisearch engine. Filter with a tiny syntax: budget ::pdf, vacation ::image, ::vault.
• Offline Wikipedia & archives — index .zip files and Kiwix .zim files, so all of Wikipedia can live on your disk and answer searches next to your own notes.
• Images too — a built-in gallery and an Explore view for flipping through everything visually.
• Private vault — sensitive files are AES-256-GCM encrypted at rest behind your password.
• Optional local AI — connect Ollama and get cited summaries of your search results, still 100% on your machine.
• Local-first by design — the app and its search engine bind to 127.0.0.1 only. The privacy page counts the network requests live: zero.

New in v0.3.18 — Linux joins Windows 🐧

v0.3.18 ships the first native Linux build (x86_64 tarball with Meilisearch bundled — extract, ./searchbox, open 127.0.0.1:8080), alongside the usual Windows installers.

It also fixes a stored-XSS vulnerability in the search UI (details) — if you're on an older version, please update.

Get it

Windows (winget)	winget install SourceBox.SearchBox
Windows (MSI)	x86_64 & ARM64 on the releases page
Linux (x86_64)	SearchBox-0.3.18-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
Docker	instructions

There's a full user manual with tutorials (first search, offline Wikipedia, the vault, AI summaries) and developer docs if you want to poke at the Rust internals.

SearchBox is AGPL-3.0 — free forever, no paid tier. If you try it, I'd genuinely love to hear what you search for and what breaks: issues and discussions are open. ⭐️s help other people find it.