Semantic search over 80,000 reports so a query finds matching sightings even with zero shared words.
Keyword search breaks when people describe the same thing with different words. Can we search 80,000 real UFO reports by meaning instead, so a query like a silent triangle over the highway finds a report about a triangular craft hovering above the road, even with zero shared words?
The full NUFORC report archive (via TidyTuesday): about 80,000 free-text sighting descriptions. The page pulls the real reports at runtime and indexes a live sample of them.
This is modern NLP: a sentence-embedding transformer (all-MiniLM-L6-v2) is downloaded and run entirely in the browser with WebAssembly (transformers.js), no server. Each report becomes a 384-dimensional vector that captures its meaning; your query becomes one too; and results are ranked by cosine similarity. The index is built once and cached in the browser (IndexedDB), so later searches are instant.
Real semantic search: type a vibe and the model surfaces sightings that mean the same thing, not ones that happen to share a word. It is the same technique behind modern search, recommendations, and retrieval-augmented AI, running live on a static page with no backend at all. Try a query like lights that changed color then vanished and watch it rank the closest real reports.