SurfSense

SurfSense

While tools like NotebookLM and Perplexity are impressive and highly effective for conducting research on any topic, imagine having both at your disposal with complete privacy control. That’s exactly what SurfSense offers. With SurfSense, you can create your own knowledge base for research, similar to NotebookLM, or easily research the web just like Perplexity. SurfSense also includes an effective cross-browser extension to directly save dynamic content bookmarks, such as social media chats, calendar invites, important emails, tutorials, recipes, and more to your SurfSense knowledge base. Now, you’ll never forget anything and can easily research everything.

Video

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/1105b5f6-3030-43e9-9f83-2df980eb2140

Key Features

• 💡 Idea: Have your own private NotebookLM and Perplexity with better integrations.
• ⚙️ Cross Browser Extension: Save your dynamic content bookmarks from your favourite browser.
• 📁 Multiple File Format Uploading Support: Save content from your own personal files(Documents, images and more) to your own personal knowledge base .
• 🔍 Powerful Search: Quickly research or find anything in your saved content.
• 💬 Chat with your Saved Content: Interact in Natural Language with your saved Web Browsing Sessions and get cited answers.
• 🎤 Podcasts your Saved Content: Create podcasts over your saved content in SurfSense knowledge base.
• 📄 Cited Answers: Get Cited answers just like Perplexity.
• 🔔 Local LLM Support: Works Flawlessly with Ollama local LLMs.
• 🏠 Self Hostable: Open source and easy to deploy locally.
• 📊 Advanced RAG Techniques: Utilize the power of Hierarchical Indices RAG.
• 🔟% Cheap On Wallet: Works Flawlessly with OpenAI gpt-4o-mini model and Ollama local LLMs.
• 🕸️ No WebScraping: Extension directly reads the data from DOM to get accurate data.

CHANGELOG

UPDATE 11 NOVEMBER 2024:

• Too many changes just fully rebranded it for better direction.
• SurfSense is now A Personal NotebookLM and Perplexity-like AI Assistant for Everyone.

all at https://github.com/MODSetter/SurfSense/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

How to get started?

PRE-START NOTE’s

File Uploading Support

SurfSense now supports uploading various file types. To enable this feature, please set up the Unstructured.io library + its prerequisites. You can follow the setup guide here: https://github.com/Unstructured-IO/unstructured?tab=readme-ov-file#installing-the-library

Podcast Support

• SurfSense internally uses https://github.com/souzatharsis/podcastfy for generation podcasts. Thanks to original author to let me use his library.
• Make sure you correctly setup ffmpeg in your system so merging of audio’s can happen.

Podcast Example

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/7dc6719d-201c-4c59-9467-1b60f283fb32

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Docker Setup

1. Setup SurfSense-Frontend/.env and backend/.env
2. Run docker-compose build --no-cache.
3. After building image run docker-compose up -d
4. Now connect the extension with docker live backend url by updating ss-cross-browser-extension/.env and building it.

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Backend

For authentication purposes, you’ll also need a PostgreSQL instance running on your machine.

Now lets setup the SurfSense BackEnd

1. Clone this repo.
2. Go to ./backend subdirectory.
3. Setup Python Virtual Environment
4. Run pip install -r requirements.txt to install all required dependencies.
5. Update/Make the required Environment variables in .env following the .env.example
6. Backend is a FastAPI Backend so now just run the server on unicorn using command uvicorn server:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000
7. If everything worked fine you should see screen like this.

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FrontEnd

For local frontend setup just fill out the .env file of frontend.

ENV VARIABLE	DESCRIPTION
NEXT_PUBLIC_API_SECRET_KEY	Same String value your set for Backend
NEXT_PUBLIC_BACKEND_URL	Give hosted backend url here. Eg. http://127.0.0.1:8000
NEXT_PUBLIC_RECAPTCHA_SITE_KEY	Google Recaptcha v2 Client Key
RECAPTCHA_SECRET_KEY	Google Recaptcha v2 Server Key

and run it using pnpm run dev

You should see your Next.js frontend running at localhost:3000

Make sure to register an account from frontend so you can login to extension.

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Extension

Extension is in plasmo framework which is a cross browser extension framework.

For building extension just fill out the .env file of frontend.

ENV VARIABLE	DESCRIPTION
PLASMO_PUBLIC_BACKEND_URL	SurfSense Backend URL eg. “http://127.0.0.1:8000”

Build the extension for your favorite browser using this guide: https://docs.plasmo.com/framework/workflows/build#with-a-specific-target

When you load and start the extension you should see a Login page like this

After logging in you should be able to use extension now.

Options	Explanations
Search Space	Search Space to save your dynamic bookmarks.
Clear Inactive History Sessions	It clears the saved content for Inactive Tab Sessions.
Save Current Webpage Snapshot	Stores the current webpage session info into SurfSense history store
Save to SurfSense	Processes the SurfSense History Store & Initiates a Save Job

Screenshots

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Tech Stack

• Extension : Manifest v3 on Plasmo
• BackEnd : FastAPI with LangChain
• FrontEnd: Next.js with Aceternity.

Architecture:

In Progress………..

Future Work

• Implement Canvas.
• Complete Hybrid Search.
• Add support for file uploads QA. [Done]
• Shift to WebSockets for Streaming responses. [Done]
• Based on feedback, I will work on making it compatible with local models. [Done]
• Cross Browser Extension [Done]

• Critical Notifications **[Done

  PAUSED]**

• Saving Chats [Done]
• Basic keyword search page for saved sessions [Done]
• Multi & Single Document Chat [Done]

Contribute

Contributions are very welcome! A contribution can be as small as a ⭐ or even finding and creating issues. Fine-tuning the Backend is always desired.

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