Building a Self-Contained Search Engine in the Browser
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
JavaScript engines inside modern web browsers are capable of running sophisticated multi-player games, rendering impressive 3D scenes, and supporting complex, interactive visualizations. Can this processing power be harnessed for information retrieval? This paper explores the feasibility of building a JavaScript search engine that runs completely self-contained on the client side within the browser - this includes building the inverted index, gathering terms statistics for scoring, and performing query evaluation. The design takes advantage of the IndexDB API, which is implemented by the LevelDB key{value store inside Google's Chrome browser. Experiments show that although the performance of the JavaScript prototype falls far short of the open-source Lucene search engine, it is sufficiently responsive for interactive applications. This feasibility demonstration opens the door to interesting applications and architectures.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it