Khoj Research Guide

Overview

Khoj is an open-source AI personal research assistant with over 33,000 GitHub stars that acts as a second brain for researchers, students, and knowledge workers. It can search and chat with your personal notes, documents, and the web to help you find information, synthesize knowledge, and conduct deep research. Khoj combines personal knowledge management with AI-powered research capabilities, making it a unique tool for academic researchers who need to work with large collections of papers, notes, and data.

Unlike general-purpose AI assistants, Khoj is designed to work with your own data. It indexes your documents -- including PDFs, markdown files, org-mode notes, plaintext, and images -- and provides an AI interface that can reason over this personal knowledge base alongside web search results. This means you can ask questions that require combining information from your personal research notes with the latest findings from the web.

Khoj supports both cloud-hosted and fully self-hosted deployments. The self-hosted option is particularly attractive for researchers working with sensitive data, unpublished manuscripts, or proprietary datasets that cannot be sent to third-party services. It supports multiple LLM backends including OpenAI, Anthropic, and local models via Ollama.

Installation and Setup

Self-Hosted Deployment (Recommended for Researchers)

# Using Docker (recommended)
docker run -d \
  --name khoj \
  -p 42110:42110 \