Show HN: Rebuilt Bible search app to run 100% client-side with Transformers.js
biblos.appI rebuilt Biblos, my semantic Bible search app, to run entirely in your browser. No more server costs. The main challenge was fitting an accurate text embedding model into browsers. Last year's version cost $20 monthly to host. The new version runs free on Vercel and searches 31k Bible verses without sending data to any server.
I pre-compute embeddings for all 31,000 Bible verses offline using BGE-large-en-v1.5. Each verse becomes a 1024-dimensional vector stored as JSON, compressed into ZIP files by book. When you visit the site, your browser downloads Transformers.js and the BGE model.
The model generates an embedding for your query, then finds similar verses using cosine similarity against the cached embeddings. Everything happens in your browser.
The app is designed to search Bible verses by semantic meaning, not just keywords. There's a separate tab to read daily passages with church fathers commentary from 15+ sources, based on a read the bible in a year plan.
Free to use, no sign-in features or anything like that. Try it out biblos.app. I'd appreciate feedback on the search experience, especially on mobile devices! Happy to discuss the technical details or help anyone building similar browser-based ML applications.
I am now wondering whether the search could be conducted on idiomatic meaning instead of semantic, as I assume the latter to be english. I'm in to the JPS translation, which is idiomatic. This preserves meaning. Most are derived from the same septaguint, I think. Could it be done in that sense?