SelfSearch 1.2.0 - Release Notes

SelfSearch has been rewritten. It is now a serverless peer-to-peer extension: the server is gone and the entire search engine runs inside the browser, with no backend, no accounts, and no cloud.

What changed

• Fully local engine. Click the icon to index a page; titles, keywords, and descriptions are extracted locally from the page's own text. No cloud, no API keys, no host permissions.
• No server to install. Load the extension, index pages, search. No setup script, no domain, no login.

Search across a trusted network (opt-in)

• Nostr identity. Your keypair is your address (npub); the secret key stays in your extension storage.
• Friends and invites. Add friends by npub, or send a friend invite that both sides accept automatically.
• WebRTC mesh. Peers connect directly over WebRTC; relays are used only for connection signaling and friend invitations.
• Bloom-filter routing. Queries fan out over a hop-limited web of trust (default 2 hops), so you can find content in your friends' networks.
• Streaming results. Answers appear as they arrive, attributed to the author, not whoever relayed them.

Trust and integrity

• Signed docs. Every doc served to peers carries a per-doc author signature. Caches verify before storing; unsigned or tampered docs are dropped, and forged answers are never shown.
• Signed tombstones. Deleting a page publishes a signed delete that propagates through the mesh, so cached copies of deleted pages disappear.
• Self-healing repair. A manifest of your docs detects loss or corruption and restores authentic copies from peers.
• Last-write-wins. Doc caches and profile sync never let an older copy roll back a newer one.

Redundancy

• docCache. Peers' docs are cached on-demand from query answers and proactively backfilled from direct friends, so content survives a peer going offline and stays searchable.
• Peers feed. See who your peers are and what they have recently indexed.

Multi-device sync

• Enter the same nsec on another device to make it the same identity; devices sharing a key link automatically and replicate your index (last-write-wins), so all your devices converge.
• Profile updates (name/avatar/bio) sync across your devices too.

Quality of life

• Omnibox search (ss <query>), Alt+Shift+S, or the search page hub with Search / Peers / Profile tabs.
• Privacy and bandwidth. Share text metadata only, the application no longer takes screenshots and does text keyword extraction instead. Relays only carry signaling and invites.

What didn't change

• Text-only metadata;
• A clear privacy policy (see PRIVACY.txt).

Development

• The project is dependency-free: pure ES modules with relative imports. Tests run with Node's built-in runner - node test/run.mjs (30 tests). No npm, no build step, nothing to install.
  (see github for more info)