# LatticeSearch — Unique Selling Points

**Find anything on your PC. Instantly. Privately.**

The one line that no competitor can say all of: *Everything-class instant search **plus** true
cross-modal AI meaning search — photos, docs, video, audio, speech, screenshots, faces — offline,
on the CPU you already own, for a one-time price.* Windows gates semantic search behind Copilot+
NPUs; Recall torched trust in local indexing; Everything is filename-only; the cloud drives phone
home. LatticeSearch is the AI search PC that never phones home.

Every claim here is backed by a measured number from the build log (`LATTICESEARCH-BRIEF-2026-07-18.md`),
and every boundary is stated honestly. We don't say "revolutionary" — we show the benchmark.

---


## Access control — the enterprise differentiator (NEW)

**You decide what the lattice can see.** Unlike every "index everything" desktop search tool,
LatticeSearch has **Personal** and **Work** modes plus **red-tape / green-tape** folder control:
- **Personal:** full-machine search, minus any folder you red-tape (private).
- **Work:** deny-by-default — the lattice indexes ONLY the folders you green-tape (allow); the rest
  of the machine is never scanned, indexed, served, or shown to an AI agent.
- **Red tape wins everywhere:** a confidential folder marked off-limits is invisible even in
  personal mode, and even inside an allowed area.

Why it matters: it makes LatticeSearch **safe to run on a work laptop with client/HR/confidential
data**, and makes an AI file-brain **something a compliance team can approve** — the data boundary
is enforced by the tool at every layer (scan, index, serve, search, agent read), with realpath
resolution so traversal can't bypass it. Confidential bytes are never loaded into the index in the
first place. See [Access Control](ACCESS-CONTROL.md).


## The five leads

1. **Instant.** Name hits in single-digit milliseconds; full multimodal search in ~72–88ms — and it
   *stayed* instant after the index roughly doubled overnight.
2. **Private.** 100% local, zero telemetry, air-gap capable, firewall-provable. The anti-Recall.
3. **No subscription.** One-time purchase with a perpetual license. You buy it; it's yours.
4. **No cloud.** Your files, embeddings, and index never leave the machine. Nothing to breach, nothing to leak.
5. **No NPU.** Runs on any CPU. GPU auto-accelerates if you have one, but it's never required.

---

## What no competitor combines

- **A. Instant speed *with* actual meaning.** Everything-class filename lookup (folders list in
  3–26ms) **and** semantic search across 1.66M files. Nobody ships both — this is the headline.
- **B. True cross-modal AI, offline, on CPU.** Images, docs (100+ languages), video, audio, speech,
  OCR, captions, faces — bundled models, zero network. Recall can't search audio or video; Spotlight
  can't search speech.
- **C. Demo-magic interactions.** Crop → original, drop-a-file → find-where-it-lives, find-similar
  for anything, a walkable content graph. The stuff that drives word-of-mouth.
- **D. Search *and* file management, fused.** A real Explorer replacement: instant browsing, safe
  file ops, dedup, backup, recovery-by-description. Search tools don't manage files; file managers
  have no semantics.
- **E. Privacy as architecture.** Air-gap capable, lite/netbook, no-admin, incognito, encrypted
  Vault + Vault USB — not a checkbox, the design.
- **F. An AI-agent substrate.** MCP + CLI that let Claude/Cursor/any agent search your machine by
  meaning — and act on it — dramatically cheaper than grep-and-read.

---

## The proof points (measured, not marketing)

### Speed
| Claim | Number | Baseline |
|---|---|---|
| Full multimodal search stayed instant as the index doubled | **72–88ms fresh** (median 87), **2–3ms** cached | its own prior 246ms era |
| Name search vs Windows Search | **5.5–14×** faster, ~10× the coverage | apple 376ms vs 2,064ms; ember 245ms vs 3,477ms |
| Bulk name/type queries vs Windows Search | **all .gif 105×** (60ms vs 6,338ms), all .mp4 6.6× | Windows SystemIndex |
| Instant explorer vs Windows Explorer | folders **3–26ms** | Windows 16–163ms |
| Rust name tier | **9.6–16.7ms median over 1,849,709 rows** | 8–25× the Python tier |
| Photos timeline | **168ms** | was 2,100ms |

### AI-agent substrate
| Claim | Number |
|---|---|
| Finding files for an agent (3-lookup task) | **44× fewer tokens, 12× faster** — 1,230 tokens / 11s vs naive grep-and-read 54,465 tokens / 133s |
| File operations vs a PowerShell spawn | write **13.6×** · read **20.1×** · copy **16.3×** · rename **18.0×** · delete **5.4×** (and recoverable) |
| A 6-step shell workflow as one `lattice sh` batch | **22.6×** (658ms vs 14,865ms); `du`'s recursive disk walk dominates the shell baseline |
| Filesystem questions (`du`/`find`/`tree`/`largest`) | answered from the in-memory index in **~ms**, no process spawn, no disk walk |

### Files, space & build
| Claim | Number | Baseline |
|---|---|---|
| Backup, smaller | **5.5×** vs source | zip 2.55× |
| Backup, faster to create | **6.7× faster** than zip | 2.1s vs 14.1s |
| Incremental backup of an unchanged tree | **0.38MB** | a fresh 65.4MB zip (~172×) |
| On-disk index compression | **10.8×** lossless (212MB → 20MB) | zstd level 3 |
| `lattice make` build cache | **~1000×** on a cache hit | 56.5s build → 57ms |

### Scale & footprint
| Claim | Number |
|---|---|
| Search held up as the index **doubled** overnight | still ~87ms |
| Headless Linux / server edition | **700,588 files in 16.6s** (42k files/s), **360MB RSS**, search 10–22ms |
| Rust name sidecar footprint | 287MB RSS (80MB private), 0.4s startup |
| Encrypted Vault unlock | ~109ms (scrypt), cross-lingual search runs *inside* the sealed vault |

---

## Anti-positioning — against what buyers use today

| You currently use… | Its limit | LatticeSearch |
|---|---|---|
| **Everything (voidtools)** | Filename-only. No meaning, no photos/audio/video, no file management. | Everything-class name speed **plus** meaning across every modality, plus a real Explorer. |
| **Windows Search / Copilot** | Slow, shallow, semantic search gated to Copilot+ NPUs; can't do meaning on a normal PC. | 5–105× faster, 10× coverage, full semantic on any CPU — no NPU. |
| **Windows Recall** | Screenshots everything; stored unencrypted; MS itself scaled it back. Privacy-toxic. | Indexes only what you point it at; nothing leaves the machine; incognito + Vault. The anti-Recall. |
| **Cloud drives (Dropbox/OneDrive/Google)** | Your files and search live on someone else's servers; subscription forever. | Local, offline, one-time. Online-only cloud files stay name-searchable but are never downloaded to index. |
| **Spotlight (Mac)** | Mac-only, shallow; can't search speech or audio content. | Cross-platform seams; searches speech, audio, OCR, captions, faces. |
| **PhotoCHAT / Excire / Eagle** | Photos-only or import-your-library niche tools; no docs, no file ops, no agent surface. | One tool for photos *and* docs *and* video/audio *and* file management *and* agents. |
| **dtSearch / DocFetcher** | Document content only; no cross-modal AI, no file management. | Docs are one of nine modalities, all in one ranked result list. |

---

## Who it's for

- **Prosumers & power users** — huge, messy drives; want Everything's speed but also "find the thing
  that *means* X" across photos, docs, and media, with a real file manager attached.
- **Privacy-conscious buyers** — anyone burned by Recall or allergic to cloud/subscriptions; want
  provable local-only search, incognito, and an encrypted searchable Vault. Air-gap and regulated
  environments included.
- **AI-agent users & developers** — Claude Code / Cursor / MCP users who want their agent to find and
  act on files for 44× fewer tokens and 12× faster; also LoRA/ML data-prep (find, dedup, caption,
  cluster).
- **Teams, agencies & servers** — the headless Linux edition (700k files, 360MB) plus MCP make it a
  shared, private search substrate; removable-drive sync and Vault USB fit field/hand-off workflows.

---

## Honest boundaries (we lead with these, not away from them)

- **Freshness:** the lattice answers from its index — milliseconds, but as fresh as the last
  scan/watch tick. The name tier is live-watched; embedding tiers backfill continuously. First index
  of a big library is progressive (name search is usable in minutes; heavy AI tiers fill in over
  hours-to-overnight, once).
- **Incognito ≠ anti-forensics:** it leaves no trace *in the lattice*, but the OS still journals
  (USN/MFT, event logs, jump lists). Deletes stay recovery-archived by design (safety over
  tracelessness).
- **Recovery-by-description** works only for files the app archived (protected-folder archiving +
  Recycle Bin). Embeddings cannot reconstruct bytes — no magic un-deletion of arbitrary files.
- **Compression** applies to the index (10.8× lossless zstd) and models (~4× int8), not to your user
  files; there is no novel lattice compressor that beats zstd/xz losslessly.
- **Crop search** nails most images but can rank a highly symmetric/patterned original at #2.
- **Meaning search is probabilistic** — which is why `lattice grep` (semantic narrow → exact match)
  is the pattern wherever precision matters.
- **`du ~400×`-class wins** come from replacing a recursive disk walk with an index lookup; the clean,
  fully-measured op-chain figure is **22.6×** across six mixed operations.

---

*The moat isn't DRM — it's update velocity, honest engineering, and being worth paying for. The
benchmarks above are the pitch.*
