Verification, as the task asked. Drove что такое фотосинтез through
/api/chat with the search reachable, with the container stopped, and with
the host blackholed. Kiwix claims the turn in both failure cases, and a
stopped container costs nothing: DNS fails and the ZIM answers inside the
same second.
The blackhole is the case that hurts. The search waited its full 8-second
budget before the ZIM was asked and the turn took 15.4s against 3.5, which
he sits through with nothing being said. So the connect phase alone is now
capped at 1.5s. A reachable instance that is merely slow keeps the whole
budget, because it is fanning out to real engines.
The RU Wikipedia ZIM is on the box (owner moved it into the kiwix zims
dir), and kiwix-serve picked it up. A Cyrillic question now searches
book_ru verbatim and skips the RU->EN rewrite: that rewriter is the
workaround for an English book, and against a Russian one it is a
translation of his own words back at him. Catalog names come from the
filename, not the <name> field — books.name=wikipedia_ru_all returns
nothing.
Measurement in docs/evals/2026-08-05-kiwix-offline-fallback.md. The RU book
answering a driven turn needs a rebuild and is not verified yet.
8080 is taken several times over on this box, and the container name is the
only thing addressing it, so the port is ours to pick.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The offline encyclopedia was the only world source, and it reads what was true
when the ZIM was built. A self-hosted SearXNG now asks first and Kiwix is the
fallback for an empty result, an unreachable instance or no line out. Owner's
ruling, 2026-08-02.
internal/websearch is deliberately thin: no rewriter (SearXNG ranks through
real engines, so the Russian question goes out as he asked it), no page fetch,
no cache. It cannot read the store, so only the query string can leave the box.
The personal boundary is unchanged and still sits above this source, so a
question about him is never searched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BFaeSbLMEVG5ey8tejU3y2
claude
kami