u/GarrettM2558

Ctrl+F has worked the same way since 1995: it matches the exact string you type. So if a doc calls it "early-termination charges" and you search "cancellation fee," you get nothing and end up re-reading the whole page.

ctrlQuery fixes that. You type what you mean ("how do I cancel my subscription?") and it highlights the passages on the page that actually match, even when the wording is totally different. A smarter Ctrl+F that understands meaning.

It also acts as a drop-in replacement for Ctrl+F with added improvements like case sensitive and whole word matching and more!

It's free to try: ctrlQuery on the Chrome Web Store

(sorry about the gif quality, it looks better than this I swear.)

Ctrl+F has worked the same way since 1995: it matches the exact string you type. So if a doc calls it "early-termination charges" and you search "cancellation fee," you get nothing and end up re-reading the whole page.

ctrlQuery fixes that. You type what you mean ("how do I cancel my subscription?") and it highlights the passages on the page that actually match, even when the wording is totally different. A smarter Ctrl+F that understands meaning.

It also acts as a drop-in replacement for Ctrl+F with added improvements like case sensitive and whole word matching and more!

It's free to try: ctrlQuery

(sorry about the gif quality, it looks better than this I swear.)

ctrlQuery is a semantic search for any webpage or PDF. Instead of matching the exact string like Ctrl+F, you type what you mean and it highlights the passages that match. So "how do I cancel my subscription?" finds the right paragraph on a help page that only ever says "deactivate account," and "is there water?" lands on the right spot in the Wikipedia article on Mars. It highlights the passage in place on the page; it doesn't summarize or rewrite anything, so you read and verify it yourself.

Two modes:

Smart Search is the semantic search. When you search, it pulls the page text, chunks it, embeds each chunk locally, embeds your query the same way, and highlights the closest matches by meaning.

Keyword Search is a drop-in upgrade to Ctrl+F:

- Match Case and Whole Word toggles

- OR clauses with color-coded highlights per term (search puppy OR kitten and each gets its own color)

- Slash commands that highlight every match of a pattern in one tap: /email, /phone, /price, /number, /date, /links, /img, plus filters like "/email gmail"

- It finds matches inside hidden content like collapsed dropdowns and lazy-loaded sections, and outlines the parent so you know where to expand. Regular Ctrl+F skips those entirely.

There's also a built-in PDF viewer so both modes work inside PDFs, since Chrome won't run content scripts on native PDF tabs.

For the extension devs here, the part you might find interesting is that it all runs on-device. The model is bge-small-en-v1.5 (384-dim, about 33MB, cached after the first download) running through transformers.js. Under MV3 the service worker can't host that workload, so the embedding runs in a Chrome offscreen document. Vectors live in Orama v3 in-memory. The one annoying surprise was persistence: u /orama/plugin-data-persistence doesn't work under MV3 service workers, so I wrote a custom IndexedDB layer to cache the indexes. Built with WXT, TypeScript, and Tailwind. You can open the Network tab during a search and watch zero outbound requests after that first model download, which is the part I'm most happy about: no account, no API key, works offline.

Limitations, stated plainly: the model is English-only right now, and it's Chrome-only (Edge and Firefox are planned, not shipped). It's a small tool that does one thing, not a research assistant.

Would love feedback, especially on the keyword features and anything that feels missing. Chrome Web Store link in the comments.

I've been building a Chrome extension called ctrlQuery and wanted to share it here and get feedback from people who use a lot of extensions.

The short version: it's semantic search for any webpage or PDF. Instead of matching the exact string like Ctrl+F, you type what you mean and it highlights the passages that match. So "how do I cancel my subscription?" finds the right paragraph on a help page that only ever says "deactivate account," and "is there water?" lands on the right spot in the Wikipedia article on Mars. It highlights the passage in place on the page; it doesn't summarize or rewrite anything, so you read and verify it yourself.

Two modes:

Smart Search is the semantic search. When you search, it pulls the page text, chunks it, embeds each chunk locally, embeds your query the same way, and highlights the closest matches by meaning.

Keyword Search is a drop-in upgrade to Ctrl+F:

- Match Case and Whole Word toggles

- OR clauses with color-coded highlights per term (search puppy OR kitten and each gets its own color)

- Slash commands that highlight every match of a pattern in one tap: /email, /phone, /price, /number, /date, /links, /img, plus filters like "/email gmail"

- It finds matches inside hidden content like collapsed dropdowns and lazy-loaded sections, and outlines the parent so you know where to expand. Regular Ctrl+F skips those entirely.

There's also a built-in PDF viewer so both modes work inside PDFs, since Chrome won't run content scripts on native PDF tabs.

For the extension devs here, the part you might find interesting is that it all runs on-device. The model is bge-small-en-v1.5 (384-dim, about 33MB, cached after the first download) running through transformers.js. Under MV3 the service worker can't host that workload, so the embedding runs in a Chrome offscreen document. Vectors live in Orama v3 in-memory. The one annoying surprise was persistence: u/orama/plugin-data-persistence doesn't work under MV3 service workers, so I wrote a custom IndexedDB layer to cache the indexes. Built with WXT, TypeScript, and Tailwind. You can open the Network tab during a search and watch zero outbound requests after that first model download, which is the part I'm most happy about: no account, no API key, works offline.

Limitations, stated plainly: the model is English-only right now, and it's Chrome-only (Edge and Firefox are planned, not shipped). It's a small tool that does one thing, not a research assistant.

Would love feedback, especially on the keyword features and anything that feels missing. Chrome Web Store link in the comments.