I Tested 3 Local Search Engines on My Notes. Here's What Actually Works.
I have almost 2,000 notes in my Obsidian vault. PDFs of research papers, course notes, random ideas, technical references. And every time I need to find something specific — a quote from a paper, a definition I wrote down months ago, a concept I know I captured somewhere — I end up scrolling, guessing filenames, or running basic text searches that return everything except what I need.
So I decided to build and benchmark three fundamentally different approaches to local document search, all running 100% on my machine. No cloud APIs. No sending my notes anywhere. Just fast, local retrieval.