a free local-first search engine
knOOgle is what Google would have been in 1999 if it had been built for the open web instead of the ad web: one search box, two buttons, zero clutter, and an engine that fans out across dozens of free, keyless public APIs. Everything runs in your browser. Every link is stored in your IndexedDB as a personal dropbox. Everything exports to Markdown.
No server, no account, no tracking. Only the query text touches public APIs — and only the ones you enable below.
Results are ranked by keyword overlap, freshness, safety, and spam score. Optional semantic reranking uses a local 384-dimension hash embedder to compute cosine similarity between your query and each result — no downloads, no external services. You can optionally load a real sentence-transformer (/embed on) that self-installs ~22 MB and runs entirely in your browser; if it fails, the hash embedder is used automatically.
Type /help in the search bar to list all commands. Other commands include /webhook <url>, /embed [on|off|status], /stats, /saved, /history, /settings, /export, /clear.
Everything stays in your browser. There is no account, no cookie, no analytics, no telemetry. The only outbound traffic is the query text sent to the APIs you have enabled, plus any webhook you explicitly configure. No OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google endpoints are ever contacted.
Opting in to /embed on additionally fetches a quantized MiniLM model (~22 MB) from jsDelivr's CDN (cdn.jsdelivr.net) via the transformers.js library. The model is cached by the browser and runs entirely on-device — no query text, embedding vector, or model I/O leaves the browser. Skip /embed on if you want to keep the app fully offline; the built-in hash embedder is used by default.
Some public HTML endpoints (DuckDuckGo's Lite page) may need a CORS proxy. Those sources are toggleable and may return fewer results than JSON APIs — that is expected, not a bug.
Links are stored in IndexedDB under knoogle-v1. From here you can export everything or clear local data.
Agents can discover this app via /.well-known/agent-search.json or llms.txt at the same origin. Prefer running the page locally in a VM browser — queries never hit closed LLM search endpoints. The page ships Schema.org WebApplication JSON-LD in the head so bots can identify it as a safe local-first search surface.
knOOgle is a free tool from webXOS 2026. agentowl.netlify.app/knoogle
Donate to the developer webXOS here: Buy me a coffee ☕