I built Paper Finder, a free tool that searches arXiv, Semantic Scholar, and Crossref at once, then re-ranks the results by semantic relevance.
The ranking uses a small AI model that runs entirely in the browser, so there are no API costs or accounts. But it introduced a nasty bug: typing in the search box could freeze for up to seven seconds.
The bug
Paper Finder initially sorted results by year. To improve relevance, I added Xenova/all-MiniLM-L6-v2 through transformers.js. It embeds the query and each result, then ranks them using cosine similarity.
The results appeared before re-ranking began, so I assumed the AI work was safely happening "in the background."
