Kashaf Abi Ja'far

Treatment

A scholar with years of recorded lessons has, in practice, an unsearchable archive. The knowledge is there, but finding the ten minutes where a specific question was answered means remembering which lesson it was in and scrubbing through it.

الشيخ الذي لديه سنوات من الدروس المسجلة يملك عمليًا أرشيفًا غير قابل للبحث. المعرفة موجودة، لكن إيجاد العشر دقائق التي أُجيب فيها عن سؤال بعينه يتطلب تذكّر الدرس ثم التنقّل داخله.

This site fixes that. Lessons from the YouTube channel are transcribed automatically, articles are collected from the blog, and everything is indexed in Meilisearch. A search returns transcript segments of roughly thirty seconds each; clicking one opens the player at that timestamp. Beside the player runs an interactive transcript that follows along, can be searched within the lesson, and lets you copy a link to any single line.

يعالج الموقع ذلك. تُفرَّغ دروس قناة اليوتيوب آليًا، وتُجمَع المقالات من المدوّنة، ويُفهرس الكل في Meilisearch. يعيد البحث مقاطع تفريغ مدة كل منها نحو ثلاثين ثانية؛ والنقر على أحدها يفتح المشغّل عند تلك اللحظة. وبجانب المشغّل تفريغ تفاعلي يتابع تلقائيًا، ويمكن البحث داخله، ونسخ رابط لأي سطر.

There is no backend for search and no database. The index is static and served directly, which is why it stays fast and costs nothing to run.

لا خادم للبحث ولا قاعدة بيانات. الفهرس ثابت ويُقدَّم مباشرة، ولهذا يبقى سريعًا وبلا كلفة تشغيل.

Challenges

1. 01

   Where does a search result begin?

   The problem

   Raw transcripts come out as a stream of short caption lines. Indexing each line makes every result a fragment with no context; indexing whole lessons makes every result a two-hour video with no useful timestamp.

   What I did

   I chunk the transcript into roughly thirty-second passages that keep their start time. That is long enough to read as a thought and short enough that the timestamp is precise. The result is a readable quote that is also a jump target.

2. 02

   Arabic does not match itself

   The problem

   The same word appears with and without diacritics, with أ / إ / ا used interchangeably, with ة and ه confused, and with tatweel stretching letters. A visitor searching the phrase they remember hearing rarely types it the way the transcriber wrote it.

   What I did

   Normalisation runs identically over the index and the query, so both sides are reduced to the same canonical form before matching. Anything else produces a search that works for the person who built it and nobody else.

3. 03

   Automatic transcription is imperfect

   The problem

   ASR misreads names, technical terms and classical vocabulary, exactly the words people search for. Presenting a wrong transcript as authoritative text would misrepresent the scholar, which matters far more here than a bad search result.

   What I did

   The transcript is framed as an index into the audio, not as a quotable source. Every result leads back to the recording at that moment, so the video stays the authority and the text is only the way you find it.

4. 04

   Search with no server to search on

   The problem

   A always-on search backend for a free, non-commercial site is a recurring cost and a thing that can go down at 3am with nobody on call.

   What I did

   The site is built with Astro and ships a static index that the browser queries directly. Nothing needs to be running for search to work, which is the right operational profile for a project meant to outlive my attention to it.

Results

• Two searchable corpora, lessons and articles, with per-tab result counts and playlist filtering.مدوّنتان قابلتان للبحث، الدروس والمقالات، مع عدّاد نتائج لكل تبويب وتصفية بقوائم التشغيل.
• Every result is a deep link into the video at the second it was said.كل نتيجة رابط عميق إلى الفيديو عند الثانية التي قيلت فيها.
• Static, serverless search: no database, no login, no running cost.بحث ثابت بلا خادم: بلا قاعدة بيانات وبلا تسجيل دخول وبلا كلفة تشغيل.