Towards a Universal Personal Search

I have lots of data in various places: I have a database of books on my physical shelf, of videogames, I have plenty of notes, a list of books I've read, blog posts, a web archive, et cetera. Each of those is searchable; but they're searchable separately, each in their own system.

That makes it more tedious to search for a single thing in multiple places. And it doesn't enable serendipitous lateral discoveries - I enjoy those moments when I search my knowledge base for something, and find connections to other things, sometimes only marginally related, that would never have occurred to me otherwise.

So I've always intended to build a system that would take in all my info, index it, and make it searchable.

And it works. It's in alpha now, but I've already gotten a lot of use (and joy) from it. At first, I loaded it up with info about games, books, and reading; they were the easiest since they already were in a database. Then later added an index of e-books. There's still a lot more I want in there: my notes (but not all of their contents; most probably some snippets and metadata); web archive, blog posts, et cetera.

Each search result gets a card: it has a cover image, basic information, and a footer with links and an item category icon.

Right now it looks like this:

Yes, the visuals need work, but they're not a priority right now.
(Just to be clear: this is a personal project of mine, and it won't be publicly accessible in any way.)

Update: the tech stack behind this is described in the follow-up post.