nesift

Fast, local semantic search over web content for AI agents. Sifts the net for signal — uses ~90% fewer tokens than raw web_fetch.

What it does

When an AI agent researches the web, the usual flow is: search → fetch 10 pages → drown in 100k+ tokens of irrelevant prose. nesift sits between the web and the agent: it ingests pages on the fly, indexes them with hybrid BM25 + embeddings, deduplicates redundant content across sources, and returns only the chunks that fit your token budget.

• Local — runs on CPU, no API keys, no cloud calls (other than the page fetch itself).

• Zero setup — pip install -e ., no database, no daemon.

• Session-scoped — index lives in /tmp and is per-session by default.

• Hybrid retrieval — BM25 + potion-retrieval-32M embeddings fused via RRF.

• Context budget mode — --budget N trims results to N tokens.

• Cross-page dedup — collapses near-identical chunks, notes source count.

• SearXNG bridge — nesift search "..." does search + filter + fetch + index + answer in one command.

Related MCP server: local-memory-mcp

Install

git clone git@github.com:scottgl9/nesift.git
cd nesift
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"

Requires Python 3.11+.

Quickstart

# Index a page and ask about it
nesift add https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrieval-augmented_generation
nesift query "what is RAG used for" --budget 1500
nesift answer "how does RAG reduce hallucinations"

# Pre-fetch scoring — rank snippets before downloading
nesift score "vector database" "Pinecone is a vector DB" "How to bake bread"

# One-shot SearXNG search + ingest + answer
NESIFT_SEARXNG_URL=http://127.0.0.1:8888 \
  nesift search "retry logic in distributed systems" --top 5 --budget 2000

nesift list
nesift clear

See docs/cli.md for every command and flag.

How it works

URL → trafilatura extract → heading-aware chunker → triage summary
         → BM25 index + potion-retrieval-32M embeddings (CPU)
         → query: RRF fusion + dedup + budget trim → ranked chunks or synthesized answer

See docs/architecture.md.

MCP server

pip install "nesift[mcp]"
nesift-mcp     # stdio MCP server

Tools exposed: score_snippets, add_page, add_batch, query, answer, list_pages, clear, search. See docs/mcp.md.

PDF ingestion

nesift add https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.11401.pdf

Content type is auto-detected; .pdf URLs (or any response with the PDF signature) route through pypdf.

Multilingual

nesift add https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/... --lang

--lang swaps in potion-multilingual-128M (101 languages).

License

GPL-2.0-only — see LICENSE.