Show HN: ParqDB – No query server. Vector search in the browser

petrizhang2 pts0 comments

ParqDB // HTTP index console

PARQDB / TRANSFORMER BOOTFIRST LOAD IS CACHED

LOADING TRANSFORMER

Preparing the MiniLM embedding runtime in your browser…

QUERY TEXT NEVER LEAVES THIS TAB0%

WIKI SEARCH

NO QUERY SERVER. JUST OBJECT STORAGE + YOUR BROWSER.

SEARCH ↵<br>RANDOM QUERY

QUERY IDLE<br>0%

VIEW RESULTS ↓<br>Type a question to search 100,000 Wikipedia articles. ParqDB builds an IVF-LVQ8 index over their MiniLM embeddings and publishes it to object storage as immutable Parquet files. Your browser embeds the query, reads only the required byte ranges, and ranks results in WASM. No query server sees your data.

LEGACYbrowser ──QUERY──> vector DB ──READ──> object storageVECTOR DB ×

PARQDBbrowser + WASM ──HTTP RANGE──> object storageDIRECT

01 / queryadvanced

QUERY TEXT shared with search above

SEARCH ↵RANDOM QUERY

INDEX MANIFEST immutable Parquet

NPROBE nlist 2,048

TOP_K max 100

encoding—

dimension—

articles—

embeddingMINILM / ONNX

transportHTTP RANGE

computeBROWSER WASM

Ready. No index loaded.

02 / query profilerAWAITING EXECUTION

requests0

memory range hits0

transferred0 B

selected cids—

candidates—

query time—

EMBEDtext → 384d in ONNX/WASM

DISCOVERmanifest.json

ROUTEglobal LVQ8 centroid top-nprobe

PRUNEfooter → selected row groups

RANKLVQ8 distance + bounded top-k

LOOKUPdoc_id → Wikipedia rows

03 / HTTP trace0 MEM HITS · ORDERED CACHE + NETWORK EVENTS

$ waiting for range requests_

04 / WIKIPEDIA RESULTS · RANGE-LOOKED-UP BY DOC_ID

$ no rows materialized

query search range parqdb browser index

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