From Chaos to Clarity: Introducing SearchBox, the Private Local-First Search Engine
SearchBox Home Screen
By S’Bussiso Dube/SourceBox Team
In an era of "Cloud-Everything," we’ve been conditioned to believe that for a tool to be powerful, it has to be connected. We upload our sensitive documents to cloud drives and our private notes to online Notion pages, trading our privacy for the convenience of a search bar. At SourceBox, we believe you shouldn't have to choose between productivity and privacy.
Today, we are thrilled to announce the release of SearchBox — a high-performance, local-first document search engine that puts you back in control of your data.
What is SearchBox?
SearchBox is a self-hosted application that turns your computer into a private knowledge base. Instead of hunting through nested folders, you can search the actual content of your files—PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheets, notes, and more—instantaneously. All of this is wrapped in a beautiful UI interface making it nice and easy to view files as if they were web pages.
But the real magic is in the "Local-First" philosophy. SearchBox doesn't "phone home." There is only one local account to create, no subscriptions to manage, and absolutely no data leaving your machine unless you are using Ollama Cloud rather than a local model.
Welcome to SearchBox.
Supports tons of different file types with a nice browser like experience. It’s like google but for your files.
Search Off the Grid.
Here is an example of a search on a small Wikipedia ZIM file from kiwix.
More Than a File Search Engine.
Here is an example of a search result rendered as a webpage. Fullscreen is also available.
Features That Change the Game
The Encrypted Vault: Not all files are created equal. For your most sensitive documents, SearchBox includes a military-grade encrypted vault (AES-256). Your files are locked behind your admin password, ensuring that even if someone has access to your filesystem, your vault remains a black box. This is done all while files in your vault still remain searchable to you.
Encrypted Vault.
Encrypted for your most sensitive documents while still being searchable.
Local AI Summaries (Powered by Ollama) We’ve integrated the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) while keeping them entirely offline. By connecting SearchBox to Ollama, you can generate AI summaries of your search results. You get the intelligence of an AI search assistant without your private documents ever touching a third-party server.
AI Search Assistance.
This is an example of a 100% local search with Ollama enable. AI features are disabled by default
See It, Don't Just Find It: Results come with a visual image gallery and per-document thumbnails, and a built-in viewer renders PDFs, articles, and images right inside the app — images, links and all — so you go from query to answer without ever opening another program.
Not Just a Text Search Engine.
You can search for more than just documents. SearchBox supports images and a gallery search.
SearchBox Keeps it Organized.
The images you search are still linked to your documents allowing quick navigation and convenience.
More Benefits
Blazing Fast, Typo-Tolerant Search: Using a sidecar Meilisearch engine, SearchBox provides an "instant-as-you-type" experience. Meilisearch is a lightning fast search engine supporting both semantic and full text search. Whether you’re searching for a specific invoice or a keyword in a 100-page manual, SearchBox finds it—even if you misspell it.
Index Almost Anything: Point it at a folder, a ZIP, a Wikipedia/Kiwix .zim archive, or your qBittorrent downloads, and it pulls searchable text out of PDFs, Word and Excel files, web pages, Markdown, and more — turning a scattered mess of formats into one unified search box.
100% Private & Local by Design: SearchBox runs entirely on your machine — no cloud, no accounts, no telemetry. Your files are indexed and searched locally, and nothing leaves your computer unless you explicitly ask it to. It's the search experience of a tech giant, without handing a tech giant your documents.
Free, Open-Source, and Yours: No subscription, no seat licenses, no vendor lock-in. SearchBox is open source (AGPL) and self-hosted — install the single signed-free MSI (now on x64 and ARM64 Windows), and the bundled search engine sets itself up automatically.
Who is this for?
Researchers & Academics: Who deal with hundreds of PDFs and need to find specific citations quickly.
Privacy Advocates: Who want the power of AI and indexing without the risk of cloud leaks.
Professionals: Handling sensitive client data that cannot be uploaded to external servers.
The "Digital Packrat": Anyone with a "Downloads" folder that has become a black hole.
SearchBox was built on the belief that powerful software should be transparent and accessible. As an open-source project, we are committed to evolving this tool based on the needs of our users. Whether you're a privacy enthusiast, a researcher, or just someone tired of a messy 'Downloads' folder, we'd love for you to try it out.
Download the latest release and let us know what you think. Your feedback helps us build a better, more private search experience for everyone.
Get Started Today
SearchBox is open-source and free. We believe that tools for privacy should be accessible to everyone
