Back to "Where's the semantic search Scott?"

This is a viewer only at the moment see the article on how this works.

To update the preview hit Ctrl-Alt-R (or ⌘-Alt-R on Mac) or Enter to refresh. The Save icon lets you save the markdown file to disk

This is a preview from the server running through my markdig pipeline

Where's the semantic search Scott?

Wednesday, 03 December 2025

Ok quick piece here. You've read all about semantic search, in MANY articles here. But you may have noticed; THIS SITE AIN'T ACTUALLY USING IT YET. So where is it?

Simple the way I deploy this site means I NEED downtime to change my docker-compose.yml specifically to add

  mostlylucid:
    image: scottgal/mostlylucid:latest
    restart: always
    labels:
      - "com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable=true"
    env_file:
      - .env
    environment:
...
      - SemanticSearch__Enabled=${SEMANTICSEARCH_ENABLED}
      - SemanticSearch__QdrantUrl=http://qdrant:6333
      - SemanticSearch__CollectionName=${SEMANTICSEARCH_COLLECTIONNAME}
      - SemanticSearch__EmbeddingModelPath=${SEMANTICSEARCH_EMBEDDINGMODELPATH}
      - SemanticSearch__VocabPath=${SEMANTICSEARCH_VOCABPATH}
      - SemanticSearch__VectorSize=${SEMANTICSEARCH_VECTORSIZE}
      - SemanticSearch__RelatedPostsCount=${SEMANTICSEARCH_RELATEDPOSTSCOUNT}
      - SemanticSearch__MinimumSimilarityScore=${SEMANTICSEARCH_MINIMUMSIMILARITYSCORE}
      - SemanticSearch__SearchResultsCount=${SEMANTICSEARCH_SEARCHRESULTSCOUNT}

 qdrant:
    image: qdrant/qdrant:latest
    container_name: qdrant
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - qdrant-data:/qdrant/storage
    networks:
      - app_network
    environment:
      - QDRANT__SERVICE__GRPC_PORT=6334

Which is really all I need. It IS running on my local test instance (https://local.mostlylucid.net) and I'm able to quickly troubleshoot and tweak this more easily (it's literally on a laptop next to me; old laptops make GREAT homelab machines and Cloudflare Tunnels make it SEAMLESS). So have a play if you like.

It WILL arrive at some point; likely over Christmas when my traffic drops / I can't sleep one night. Until then the site is an example of graceful degradation as it works either way 🤓.

logo

© 2025 Scott Galloway — Unlicense — All content and source code on this site is free to use, copy, modify, and sell.