Case Study
AI Architecture & Systems Case Study
WebFind
Self-Hosted Web Research & Hybrid Search Engine for Local LLMs
Role & Architecture
Systems Architect
Release Timeline
July 2026
Core Stack
Rust • Turso / libSQL
Verification
Production Tested
1 / 1
01Executive Overview
WebFind is a self-hosted web research engine and Google-style search interface built in Rust. It crawls, indexes, ranks, and searches the live web for local and free LLMs without API keys, cloud subscriptions, or auth barriers, persisting link graphs to an embedded Turso store.
02The Engineering Challenge
Operational Problem & Constraints
Critical friction and failure modes observed in existing workflows
Free and locally hosted LLMs (Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM) lack real-time web search capabilities, which commercial providers lock behind expensive subscription tiers.
03Architecture & Technical Solution
System Architecture & Algorithmic Design
Engineering methodology, model selection, and pipeline design
Engineered a single-binary search system featuring a high-concurrency crawler with headless Chromium (CDP) support, dense vector embedding ranking (fastembed-rs) fused with Tantivy BM25 and PageRank via Reciprocal Rank Fusion, all persisted in an embedded Turso/libSQL database.
04Quantified Impact & Benchmarks
Empirical Outcomes & Performance Metrics
Validated benchmarks, latency figures, and operational efficiency
Provides 100% private, zero-cost, real-time web research to autonomous AI agents and humans through both a single-call CLI and a real-time SSE Web UI.
05Core Capabilities & System Features
01
Single-call CLI research command crawling, persisting, and ranking live web pages
02
Hybrid BM25 + dense vector semantic search fused via Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF)
03
Embedded Turso/libSQL graph memory accumulating link graphs and PageRank over time
04
Deep crawler with headless Chromium (CDP) for JavaScript-rendered SPA extraction
05
Google-style responsive Web UI with instant autocomplete and SSE live streaming
06
Clean agent-native noise-free markdown extraction stripping ads and boilerplate
07Technologies & Frameworks
Production libraries, architectural components, and runtimes used in this system:
Rust
Turso / libSQL
Tantivy BM25
FastEmbed
Axum
HTMX
Tailwind CSS
Chromium CDP
PageRank
DiskANN
08Artifacts & Verifiable Deliverables
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