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That’s honestly a great baseline: org files + grep is fast, local, durable, and zero “system overhead”.

If you could improve just one thing without abandoning grep, would it be:

1. fuzzy/semantic search when you don’t remember the exact term, or

2. better resurfacing (a lightweight way to recall relevant notes when a project becomes active)?

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Probably 1.

All my notes for a project are usually under one or two org files.

An idea I've had though, which I hope somebody steals, is for a search engine that follows up all the links in my notes (and one or two degrees of separation from there), and allows me to end up in those places again next time I search for something.

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You’re basically describing “search that expands context”: start from the matches, then follow outbound links (and maybe one more hop), index the linked pages/snippets, and treat that neighborhood as the result set. The killer feature is the re-entry part: “take me back to the same cluster of places I ended up last time I looked into this.”

Two quick questions:

1. Are your links mostly local files, web URLs, or a mix? 2. When you say “end up in those places again”, do you want it to save a trail/session automatically (like a breadcrumb graph), or just learn “these links co-occur with this query” over time?

I’m exploring a similar “context neighborhood” retrieval loop (more context in my HN profile/bio if you want to compare notes).

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