Context
Sometimes the thing you're looking for isn't defined by its words.
It's defined by the Tuesday it arrived, the person who sent it, the deck it belonged to, or the app you were in when you grabbed it.
Context is the part of a memory that survives when the content has gone.
01 · The situation
\u201cIt was during the pricing week.\u201d
That sentence contains no keyword. It contains a situation, and it is a far more reliable memory than anything you could type into a text field.
Content search throws that sentence away. Contextual search treats it as the query.
02 · Context signals
What surrounds a saved thing.
- Time
- The day and hour it arrived. “That afternoon” becomes a filter, and things saved minutes apart stay related.
- Application
- Whether it came from a browser, a design tool, a terminal, a chat. Recorded at capture.
- Website
- The domain a link or page came from, so one source can be traced across months.
- Project
- The work it belonged to, which is how most people file things in their heads.
- Documents
- PDFs and pages are read, so a deck can be found by a phrase buried on page nine.
- People and companies
- Names Shelf reads inside what you keep. Early, and improving release by release.
- Relationships
- What was saved alongside it. Neighbours are context you never had to record.
A memory is rarely a thing on its own. It's a thing plus its circumstances.
03 · How a query reads
One query, several kinds of clue.
You don't switch modes. You write the sentence you'd say out loud, and Shelf reads content and context from it at once.
- “the PDF Ana sent during the pricing week”A person, a document type and a rough period, all in one line.
- Content and circumstancesIt matches meaning inside documents, then weights by the period and the source you named.
- A short list you recogniseNot one lucky hit. A small, dated set with the things saved around them.
04 · Neighbours
Why the things nearby matter.
Two saves from the same hour, on the same work, are almost always about each other.
If this idea interested you…
Shelf V3 is out now
Shelf V3 is the current build. Shelf does not use automatic updates, so download the latest build here and install it over your current version.
This is intentional. Shelf is built around a local-first, privacy-focused philosophy. An automatic updater requires additional background processes, network connections, update infrastructure, and another system with permission to modify the app. We prefer to keep Shelf’s network footprint and background activity as small as possible.
Manual updates keep the process explicit: Shelf only checks the internet when a feature actually needs it, and you decide when a new version is downloaded and installed.