Building Monocle, a universal personal search engine for life

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Style Pass
2021-07-08 02:30:06

Monocle is a full text search engine indexed on my personal data, like my blog posts and essays, nearly a decade of journal entries, notes, contacts, Tweets, and hopefully more in the future, like emails and web browsing history. It lets me query this entire dataset to look for anything I’ve seen or written about before, and acts as a true “extended memory” for my entire life.

As soon as it went live, Monocle quickly replaced the search field on nearly every other app I use, and became the first and only place I searched for information that I knew I’d seen before. Whether I was searching up someone I had met before, a new blog idea, or a scratch piece of note about how to do something with JavaScript – Monocle had it all, and got it to me in under 5 seconds from anywhere on my computer.

I first had the idea for Monocle almost exactly a year ago, when I tweeted about potentially building a search engine that only searches my private and personal data.

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