Overview
Sift
A Chrome extension that brings semantic search to any webpage. Instead of matching exact keywords like Ctrl+F, Sift understands the meaning of your query and finds the most relevant passages on the page.
How it works
When you visit a page, Sift's content script breaks the page into text chunks and sends them to a background service worker. The service worker runs the all-MiniLM-L6-v2 sentence transformer model locally to generate embeddings for each chunk. When you search, your query is embedded and compared against the stored chunks using cosine similarity, returning the top 3 matches.
Usage tips
Sift works best when your queries are phrased as natural language questions or longer statements rather than short keywords. For example:
- "What were the main causes of the conflict?" works better than "causes"
- "How does photosynthesis produce energy?" works better than "photosynthesis energy"
This is because the underlying model is trained on sentence-level similarity, so it understands full questions better than keyword fragments.
Performance
Embedding generation runs locally in-browser, so it can take some time on large pages. Small articles process in a few seconds; very long pages (like detailed Wikipedia articles) may take longer. The model only needs to load once per session — subsequent pages will be faster.
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🔐 Security Analysis
This extension hasn't been security-scanned yet.
