Operand was inspired by Vannevar Bush's Memex—the idea that you could capture and resurface your entire digital experience. We built tools to proactively surface relevant information from everything you'd ever seen, read, or saved.
Operand Drive was our consumer product: a knowledge storage platform that looked like Dropbox but went beyond just files. Under the hood, it was powered by our Semantic Search API which was the same engine external developers used to index millions of documents for their own RAG and memory systems.
Check out the demo to try it yourself.
Full filesystem in the browser: Upload files, create folders, move things around—all the familiar file management you'd expect.
Semantic search: Ask questions in natural language. Search across file contents, not just names.
Automatic link fetching: Copy a URL and we'd fetch and index the content automatically.
File previews: Preview documents, images, and PDFs without downloading.
Pinning and recents: Pin important files and quickly access recently viewed items.
External integrations: Connect external sources like Notion, Slack, and RSS feeds. Everything searchable in one place.
The full version (before we shut down) also had AI-powered features like chat with your files and prompt-based notifications. You could set up alerts like "notify me when new content mentions budget changes" and we'd run prompts on new content automatically. This was a beta feature we were still refining.
Semantic Search API
The core of Operand was the Semantic Search API, designed for adding search and memory into applications. While Drive was our consumer-facing product, the API is where we saw real scale: external developers used it to index millions of documents for RAG systems, chatbots, and knowledge bases.
The API handled document processing, embedding generation, and vector search. Developers could index any content type and query it with natural language. This infrastructure powered all of our products.
Other Operand Products
Chrome Extension: Automatically indexed pages as you browsed and injected Operand results into Google search. See the Chrome Extension project.
AI Assistant (pre-ChatGPT): An iMessage bot that could answer questions about your indexed content. It had an early version of tool-calling where we'd generate and run JavaScript on the fly to handle queries dynamically.
Electron Desktop App: A native desktop app for teams who wanted Operand outside the browser.
Note: Operand shut down in late 2023, but I've put together a limited demo that shows the core file and link experience.