[item007]

That’s a really important definition of “zero setup”: no long-running indexing jobs, and no “crunch for 24 hours on my laptop” just to make search usable.

And I hear you on cross-network fragmentation — in a lot of real environments the hardest part isn’t search quality, it’s that data lives on different machines, different networks, and you only have partial visibility at any given time.

If you had to pick, would you rather have:

1.instant local indexing over whatever is reachable right now (even if incomplete), or

2.a lightweight distributed approach that can index in-place on each machine/network and only share metadata/results across boundaries?

I’m exploring this “latency + partial visibility” constraint as a first-class requirement (more context in my HN profile/bio if you want to compare notes).

[Neywiny]

To be very clear, there are networks that exist that do not share anything across the boundary. I'm maybe not your prime customer, but some people get very hung up on such things and we go in circles about feasibility. So in that 2 is an impossibility at times, I'd prefer 1.