If this sounds like your week
When Windows Search gets in the way
developers search for release-candidate, search-sentinel, and vendor-tool.exe artifacts where hyphens carry meaning. Windows Search can tokenize punctuation in ways that bury exact artifact names behind broad document matches. the disk already contains target, dist, and installer outputs when the developer needs one binary immediately.
Where tooling usually breaks
Why local-first matters
index.db, config.json, and logs stay under %APPDATA%\SearchSentinel instead of a vendor-hosted workspace. Search queries are not uploaded for AI enhancement, analytics, or ad targeting. You buy the app once and keep the search index as a local workstation asset.
Technical proof points
- unicode61 tokenizer - Hyphen token char - BM25 - Prefix last token - SQLite FTS5 - BM25 ranking - 120 ms debounce