minne/docs/features.md

Features

Search vs Chat

Search — Use when you know what you're looking for. Full-text search matches query terms across your content.

Chat — Use when exploring concepts or reasoning about your knowledge. The AI analyzes your query and retrieves relevant context from your entire knowledge base.

Content Processing

Minne automatically processes saved content:

1. Web scraping extracts readable text from URLs (via headless Chrome)
2. Text analysis identifies key concepts and relationships
3. Graph creation builds connections between related content
4. Embedding generation enables semantic search

Knowledge Graph

Explore your knowledge as an interactive network:

• Manual curation — Create entities and relationships yourself
• AI automation — Let AI extract entities and discover relationships
• Hybrid approach — AI suggests connections for your approval

The D3-based graph visualization shows entities as nodes and relationships as edges.

Hybrid Retrieval

Minne uses hybrid retrieval over the knowledge base:

• Vector similarity — Semantic matching via embeddings
• Full-text search — Keyword matching with BM25

For content search (chat, global search, ingestion linking), retrieval is chunk-first: vector and FTS run over text_chunk rows, merged with Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF). When entities are needed, they are derived from the top retrieved chunks grouped by source_id.

For relationship suggestions when creating an entity, retrieval is entity-first: vector and FTS run directly over knowledge_entity name/description and embedding indexes, then merged with the same RRF approach.

Optional reranking can rescore fused chunk lists with a cross-encoder model; see below.

Reranking (Optional)

When enabled, retrieval results are rescored with a cross-encoder model for improved relevance. Powered by fastembed-rs.

Trade-offs:

• Downloads ~1.1 GB of model data
• Adds latency per query
• Potentially improves answer quality, see blog post

Enable via RERANKING_ENABLED=true. See Configuration.

Multi-Format Ingestion

Supported content types:

• Plain text and notes
• URLs (web pages)
• PDF documents
• Audio files
• Images

Scratchpad

Quickly capture content without committing to permanent storage. Convert to full content when ready.

iOS Shortcut

Use the Minne iOS Shortcut for quick content capture from your phone.