basicmachines-co-basic-memory/docs/semantic-search.md

Semantic Search

This guide covers Basic Memory's semantic (vector) search feature, which adds meaning-based retrieval alongside the existing full-text search.

Overview

Basic Memory's search supports both full-text search (FTS) and semantic retrieval. Semantic search adds vector embeddings that capture the meaning of your content, enabling:

• Paraphrase matching: Find "authentication flow" when searching for "login process"
• Conceptual queries: Search for "ways to improve performance" and find notes about caching, indexing, and optimization
• Hybrid retrieval: Combine the precision of keyword search with the recall of semantic similarity

Semantic search is enabled by default when semantic dependencies are available at runtime. It works on both SQLite (local) and Postgres (cloud) backends.

Installation

Semantic search dependencies (fastembed, sqlite-vec, openai) are included in the default basic-memory install.

pip install basic-memory

You can always override with BASIC_MEMORY_SEMANTIC_SEARCH_ENABLED=true|false.

Platform Compatibility

Platform	FastEmbed (local)	OpenAI (API)
macOS ARM64 (Apple Silicon)	Yes	Yes
macOS x86_64 (Intel Mac)	No — see workaround below	Yes
Linux x86_64	Yes	Yes
Linux ARM64	Yes	Yes
Windows x86_64	Yes	Yes

Intel Mac Workaround

The default install includes FastEmbed, which depends on ONNX Runtime. ONNX Runtime dropped Intel Mac (x86_64) wheels starting in v1.24, so install with a compatible ONNX Runtime pin first:

pip install basic-memory 'onnxruntime<1.24'

After installation, Intel Mac users have two runtime options:

Option 1: Use OpenAI embeddings (recommended)

export BASIC_MEMORY_SEMANTIC_SEARCH_ENABLED=true
export BASIC_MEMORY_SEMANTIC_EMBEDDING_PROVIDER=openai
export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...

Option 2: Use FastEmbed locally

Keep the same pinned installation and use FastEmbed (default provider):

export BASIC_MEMORY_SEMANTIC_SEARCH_ENABLED=true
export BASIC_MEMORY_SEMANTIC_EMBEDDING_PROVIDER=fastembed

Quick Start

1. Install Basic Memory:

pip install basic-memory

2. (Optional) Explicitly enable semantic search:

export BASIC_MEMORY_SEMANTIC_SEARCH_ENABLED=true

3. Build vector embeddings for your existing content:

bm reindex --embeddings

4. Search using semantic modes:

# Pure vector similarity
search_notes("login process", search_type="vector")

# Hybrid: combines FTS precision with vector recall (recommended)
search_notes("login process", search_type="hybrid")

# Explicit full-text search
search_notes("login process", search_type="text")

Configuration Reference

All settings are fields on BasicMemoryConfig and can be set via environment variables (prefixed with BASIC_MEMORY_).

Config Field	Env Var	Default	Description
semantic_search_enabled	BASIC_MEMORY_SEMANTIC_SEARCH_ENABLED	Auto (true when semantic deps are available)	Enable semantic search. Required before vector/hybrid modes work.
semantic_embedding_provider	BASIC_MEMORY_SEMANTIC_EMBEDDING_PROVIDER	"fastembed"	Embedding provider: "fastembed" (local) or "openai" (API).
semantic_embedding_model	BASIC_MEMORY_SEMANTIC_EMBEDDING_MODEL	"bge-small-en-v1.5"	Model identifier. Auto-adjusted per provider if left at default.
semantic_embedding_dimensions	BASIC_MEMORY_SEMANTIC_EMBEDDING_DIMENSIONS	Auto-detected	Vector dimensions. 384 for FastEmbed, 1536 for OpenAI. Override only if using a non-default model.
semantic_embedding_batch_size	BASIC_MEMORY_SEMANTIC_EMBEDDING_BATCH_SIZE	64	Number of texts to embed per batch.
semantic_vector_k	BASIC_MEMORY_SEMANTIC_VECTOR_K	100	Candidate count for vector nearest-neighbour retrieval. Higher values improve recall at the cost of latency.

Embedding Providers

FastEmbed (default)

FastEmbed runs entirely locally using ONNX models — no API key, no network calls, no cost.

• Model: BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5
• Dimensions: 384
• Tradeoff: Smaller model, fast inference, good quality for most use cases

# Install basic-memory and enable semantic search
pip install basic-memory
export BASIC_MEMORY_SEMANTIC_SEARCH_ENABLED=true

OpenAI

Uses OpenAI's embeddings API for higher-dimensional vectors. Requires an API key.

• Model: text-embedding-3-small
• Dimensions: 1536
• Tradeoff: Higher quality embeddings, requires API calls and an OpenAI key

export BASIC_MEMORY_SEMANTIC_SEARCH_ENABLED=true
export BASIC_MEMORY_SEMANTIC_EMBEDDING_PROVIDER=openai
export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...

When switching from FastEmbed to OpenAI (or vice versa), you must rebuild embeddings since the vector dimensions differ:

bm reindex --embeddings

Search Modes

text (default)

Full-text keyword search using FTS5 (SQLite) or tsvector (Postgres). Supports boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), phrase matching, and prefix wildcards.

search_notes("project AND planning", search_type="text")

This is the existing default and does not require semantic search to be enabled.

vector

Pure semantic similarity search. Embeds your query and finds the nearest content vectors. Good for conceptual or paraphrase queries where exact keywords may not appear in the content.

search_notes("how to speed up the app", search_type="vector")

Returns results ranked by cosine similarity. Individual observations and relations surface as first-class results, not collapsed into parent entities.

hybrid

Combines FTS and vector results using score-based fusion. This is generally the best mode when you want both keyword precision and semantic recall.

search_notes("authentication security", search_type="hybrid")

Score-based fusion uses the formula max(vec, fts) + bonus * min(vec, fts) to preserve the dominant signal while rewarding results found by both methods.

When to Use Which

Mode	Best For
text	Exact keyword matching, boolean queries, tag/category searches
vector	Conceptual queries, paraphrase matching, exploratory searches
hybrid	General-purpose search combining precision and recall

The Reindex Command

The bm reindex command rebuilds search indexes without dropping the database.

# Rebuild everything (FTS + embeddings if semantic is enabled)
bm reindex

# Only rebuild vector embeddings
bm reindex --embeddings

# Only rebuild the full-text search index
bm reindex --search

# Target a specific project
bm reindex -p my-project

When You Need to Reindex

• Upgrade note: Migration now performs a one-time automatic embedding backfill on upgrade.
• Manual enable case: If you explicitly had semantic_search_enabled=false and then turn it on
• Provider change: After switching between fastembed and openai
• Model change: After changing semantic_embedding_model
• Dimension change: After changing semantic_embedding_dimensions

The reindex command shows progress with embedded/skipped/error counts:

Project: main
  Building vector embeddings...
  ✓ Embeddings complete: 142 entities embedded, 0 skipped, 0 errors

Reindex complete!

How It Works

Chunking

Each entity in the search index is split into semantic chunks before embedding:

• Headers: Markdown headers (#, ##, etc.) start new chunks
• Bullets: Each bullet item (-, *) becomes its own chunk for granular fact retrieval
• Prose sections: Non-bullet text is merged up to ~900 characters per chunk
• Long sections: Oversized content is split with ~120 character overlap to preserve context at boundaries

Each search index item type (entity, observation, relation) is chunked independently, so observations and relations are embeddable as discrete facts.

Deduplication

Each chunk has a source_hash (SHA-256 of the chunk text). On re-sync, unchanged chunks skip re-embedding entirely. This makes incremental updates fast — only modified content triggers API calls or model inference.

Hybrid Fusion

Hybrid search uses score-based fusion to merge FTS and vector results:

1. Run FTS search to get keyword-ranked results; normalize scores to [0, 1]
2. Run vector search to get similarity-ranked results (already [0, 1])
3. For each result, compute: fused = max(vec_score, fts_score) + 0.3 * min(vec_score, fts_score)
4. Sort by fused score

The dominant signal (whichever source scored higher) is preserved, and dual-source agreement adds a bonus. Unlike rank-based fusion, this approach retains score magnitude — a strong vector match stays strong even without an FTS hit.

Observation-Level Results

Vector and hybrid modes return individual observations and relations as first-class search results, not just parent entities. This means a search for "water temperature for brewing" can surface the specific observation about 205°F without returning the entire "Coffee Brewing Methods" entity.

Database Backends

SQLite (local)

• Vector storage: sqlite-vec virtual table
• Table creation: At runtime when semantic search is first used — no migration needed
• Embedding table: search_vector_embeddings using vec0(embedding float[N]) where N is the configured dimensions
• Chunk metadata: search_vector_chunks table stores chunk text, keys, and source hashes

The sqlite-vec extension is loaded per-connection. Vector tables are created lazily on first use.

Postgres (cloud)

• Vector storage: pgvector with HNSW indexing
• Chunk metadata table: Created via Alembic migration (search_vector_chunks with BIGSERIAL primary key)
• Embedding table: search_vector_embeddings created at runtime (dimension-dependent, same pattern as SQLite)
• Index: HNSW index on the embedding column for fast approximate nearest-neighbour queries

The Alembic migration creates the dimension-independent chunks table. The embeddings table and HNSW index are deferred to runtime because they depend on the configured vector dimensions.