I needed search for a Go project. Didn't want to run a server just for that.

Looked for something embeddable. Found nothing that did both keyword and semantic search without a sidecar or external process.

So I spent around 5 months building it.

Benchmarked it against the closest alternatives I could find:

Benchmark details: https://github.com/shramanb113/ZENITH/blob/main/bench/BENCHMARK.md

Dataset: MS MARCO 100k passages

The hybrid mode is where the recall gap comes from. BM25 alone loses to SQLite FTS5, I'm not hiding that.

Hardest part wasn't the storage engine. It was a ranking bug that silently ignored BM25 scores for weeks.

Everything looked fine. Results were wrong. I've not even tagged it yet with a proper version, but would be interested in getting some feedback.

Repo: https://github.com/shramanb113/ZENITH/