# Polymathy

> Polymathy is a Rust web service from Skelf-Research that transforms traditional
> search into an answer engine. It sits in front of a SearxNG instance, fetches
> the top result URLs, hands them to a configured content processor for chunking
> and embedding, and returns a JSON map of `chunk_id -> (source_url, text)`. It is
> infrastructure for building answer engines, not a turnkey RAG product.

Polymathy is published as the `polymathy` crate on crates.io, developed in the
open at github.com/skelfresearch/polymathy, and released under GPL-3.0. The
public HTTP surface is a single endpoint, `GET /v1/search?q={query}`, described
by an OpenAPI spec generated from the Rust types via `apistos`.

## Overview

- [Overview](https://polymathy.skelfresearch.com/): what the service does, the request flow, and what is intentionally not bundled.
- [About](https://polymathy.skelfresearch.com/about): the contract, the four-step request handler, what it is and is not.
- [Documentation](https://docs.skelfresearch.com/polymathy/): full docs, API reference, deployment notes.

## Notes (engineering blog)

- [Notes index](https://polymathy.skelfresearch.com/blog): all posts.
- [From 10 blue links to one cited paragraph](https://polymathy.skelfresearch.com/blog/from-10-blue-links-to-one-cited-paragraph): the shift in internal search and why the fetch-and-chunk layer deserves its own service.
- [Why answer engines need to cite](https://polymathy.skelfresearch.com/blog/why-answer-engines-need-to-cite): citations as a system invariant, not a UX flourish, and how the chunk-to-URL mapping is enforced by the response shape.
- [Why Polymathy is on Actix-web, not Axum (yet)](https://polymathy.skelfresearch.com/blog/why-actix-and-not-axum): the OpenAPI tooling drove the framework choice; the migration path to axum.

## Comparisons

- [Polymathy vs Onyx](https://polymathy.skelfresearch.com/compare/onyx): self-hosted answer-engine platform vs single fetch-and-chunk service.
- [Polymathy vs Algolia + LLM](https://polymathy.skelfresearch.com/compare/algolia-llm): hosted SaaS retrieval vs self-hosted SearxNG-backed retrieval.

## Machine-readable

- [llms-full.txt](https://polymathy.skelfresearch.com/llms-full.txt): expanded version with full prose for each page.
- [sitemap](https://polymathy.skelfresearch.com/sitemap-index.xml): XML sitemap.
- [RSS](https://polymathy.skelfresearch.com/rss.xml): notes feed.
- [robots.txt](https://polymathy.skelfresearch.com/robots.txt): AI crawler allowlist.

## Source and packages

- Source: https://github.com/Skelf-Research/polymathy
- Crate: https://crates.io/crates/polymathy
- API docs (Rust): https://docs.rs/polymathy
- License: GPL-3.0