Notion Search

Search Notion by what you mean, not just what you typed.
A private, offline replacement for the Cmd+K search in Notion Desktop, powered by Google's EmbeddingGemma 2.

uvx notion-search

Notion's own search leans on exact words and titles. It misses text deep inside long pages, links you saved, and anything you only remember by its meaning. Notion Search keeps the same Cmd+K box and answers it from your own Mac instead. It indexes every page in your workspace and ranks each query by exact words and by meaning together. Each result opens at the block that matched, with Notion's blue highlight.

Install

You need a Mac with Apple Silicon, Notion Desktop in /Applications, and uv (brew install uv works). Then run:

uvx notion-search

The first run takes 5 to 10 minutes and sets up everything: the command, the model (about 900 MB, once), the index and a background service that starts at every login. Open Notion and press Cmd+K. Run notion-search any time for the menu.

The menu

The same actions work as commands: notion-search update, status, restart, reindex, uninstall, and logs.

What gets searched

Page titles and folder paths, and the full text of every page: toggles, columns, lists, callouts and table cells. Long pages are split into chunks of about 1,500 characters, so a match deep inside a page still finds it.

Not searched: database properties (status, tags, dates) and the contents of PDFs, images and other files. Notion Desktop must have opened a page at least once before it can be indexed. New and edited pages are picked up within about 15 seconds.

Private

Everything runs on your Mac. No page text, query or telemetry leaves it, and it works offline. The only download is the model, once. Notion's database is opened read-only and Notion's app files are never changed.

The service talks to Notion over Chromium's DevTools port (127.0.0.1:9222), which any process running as you can reach. Do not use this on a Mac that other people control.

How it works

Notion Desktop ── Cmd+K ──> /api/v3/search request
        │  (intercepted over the DevTools port)
        ▼
service.py ──> engine.py ──> answer in Notion's own response format
        │                    ├─ SQLite FTS5 index   (exact words)
        │                    └─ vectors             (EmbeddingGemma 2, MLX, 8-bit)
        ▼
indexer.py: reads Notion's local database (read-only),
re-embeds only the pages whose text changed

Each query runs both ways and the results are merged. A meaning match only counts when it stands well above the usual score for that query, so nonsense queries return nothing. Pages that hold all your words, and the page you have open, get a small boost. Under each result you see the one block that matched best.

Search takes about 20 to 50 ms. Memory is about 800 MB, mostly the model. The first index takes 2 to 3 minutes for about 800 pages. After that only changed pages are processed.

FAQ

Why does Notion restart when I open it? Notion has to run with a debug port so the service can answer its searches. If you open it normally, the service restarts it once with the port enabled. Your pages are safe, because Notion saves continuously.

Windows or Linux? Not yet. The model runs on MLX, which needs Apple Silicon. A port would be a welcome contribution; see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Does it work in the browser? No. It needs Notion Desktop for Mac.

Something is wrong. Run notion-search status, then notion-search logs. If results look stale, choose Reindex in the menu.

How do I remove it? Run notion-search, choose Uninstall and confirm. uv stays, because other tools may use it.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md first.

Credits

Built with ideas from DigUp by ARahim3 (MIT), which searches local files with the same model: the model card's query and document prompts, scoring a hit against the whole score distribution for a query instead of a fixed cutoff, and a model fingerprint in the index so a model change triggers a rebuild.

License

MIT. See LICENSE. Notion Search is not affiliated with Notion Labs, Google or Apple. Notion is a trademark of Notion Labs, Inc.