Hybrid Search
flowing-abyss1k downloadsFast hybrid search (BM25 + semantic) over your vault via a background CLI.
- Overview
- Scorecard
- Updates40
Fast hybrid search for Obsidian — combines BM25 full-text and semantic (vector) search over your vault.
The plugin is a thin UI layer that communicates with the obsidian-hybrid-search CLI, which runs as a background process and handles indexing and search.
Desktop only.
Requirements
Install the CLI globally via npm:
npm install -g obsidian-hybrid-search
The CLI must be available in your PATH (or you can set a custom path in plugin settings).
Installation
Via Obsidian Community Plugins
Open the Hybrid Search page and click Add to Obsidian.
Via BRAT
- Install the BRAT plugin.
- In BRAT settings, click Add Beta Plugin and enter this repository's URL.
https://github.com/flowing-abyss/obsidian-hybrid-search-plugin
- Enable Hybrid Search in Obsidian's plugin list.
Usage
Open the search modal with:
- Ribbon icon — click the search icon in the left sidebar.
- Command palette — run
Hybrid search: Open search.
Type to search. Results appear as you type with a relevance score:
📷 Hybrid search results with relevance scores
| Score | Color | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| >0.8 | Green | High relevance |
| 0.5–0.8 | Orange | Medium relevance |
| <0.5 | Gray | Low relevance |
Empty query & similar notes
Leave the query empty and the plugin shows contextually relevant results:
- If a note is open, it surfaces semantically similar notes.
- If no note is open, it shows recently opened files.
📷 Semantically similar notes
Workbench
The plugin includes a link-discovery workbench that analyzes your vault's knowledge graph to surface the most actionable connections for the current note. It runs several graph algorithms side by side:
- Best — top candidates ranked by a composite of structural and semantic signals.
- Missing Links — notes that are strongly related but not yet linked.
- Bridges — notes that connect otherwise distant parts of your graph.
- Similar — semantically close notes.
- Links — existing outgoing and incoming links.
- Diagnostics — structural insights about the note's position in the graph.
Each candidate exposes interpretable scores — cosine, Adamic-Adar, common neighbors, co-citation count, semantic distance, and more — so you can decide whether a suggested link makes sense. You can add links, inspect backlinks, or compare notes directly from the list, while a live local graph visualizes the neighborhood around the current file.
📷 Link-discovery workbench
Query Syntax
These two queries are equivalent:
hybrid: zettelkasten tag:project limit:20 @rerank
zettelkasten #project @limit:20 @rerank @hybrid
| Inline | Postfix | Description |
|---|---|---|
| (plain text) | — | Hybrid search (default) |
hybrid: |
@hybrid / @hyb |
Hybrid mode (BM25 + semantic) |
semantic: / sem: |
@semantic / @sem |
Semantic (vector) only |
fulltext: / full: |
@full |
Full-text (BM25) only |
title: |
@title |
Fuzzy title match |
tag: |
#tag |
Filter by tag (include) |
tag:- |
-#tag |
Filter by tag (exclude) |
folder: |
— | Limit to a folder |
limit:N |
@limit:N / @lim:N |
Override result count |
threshold:N |
@threshold:N / @th:N |
Minimum score threshold |
| — | @rerank |
Re-rank with cross-encoder |
key:value |
— | Filter by frontmatter field |
Filters can be combined freely.
Hotkeys
| Hotkey | Action |
|---|---|
Mod+J / Mod+K |
Next / previous result |
Mod+P |
Toggle preview panel |
Mod+G |
Toggle local graph panel |
Mod+O |
Open selected in new tab |
Mod+Shift+O |
Open all results in new tabs |
Alt+Enter |
Insert wiki link to selected note |
Alt+Shift+Enter |
Insert wiki links to all results |
Mod = Ctrl (Windows/Linux) or Cmd (macOS). Alt = Option on macOS.
License
MIT