
Show HN: Epstein-Search – Local, AI-Powered Search Engine for the Epstein FilesHi HN, I built epstein-search, an open-source Python CLI and library to run semantic search and RAG over the publicly released Epstein Files (unsealed court documents, depositions, FBI reports, and flight logs). I wanted a way to easily navigate through these thousands of pages of unstructured legal PDFs without relying on a paid third-party service or sending data back and forth to a cloud provider. How it works under the hood: Running epstein-search setup downloads ~100K pre-computed document chunks and embeddings (using all-MiniLM-L6-v2) based on the public 20K document corpus. It imports these into zvec (a local vector database) so the index is ready in about a minute. Standard search (epstein-search search) embeds your query locally using sentence-transformers and does a vector similarity search. This step is 100% offline and requires no API keys. For the conversational RAG mode (epstein-search chat or ask), it uses LiteLLM. You can point it to an Ollama or LM Studio instance for
