Telegram Search

Telegram Search is an open-source tool that exports Telegram chats and searches them by keyword, meaning and image, with AI answers and summaries.

Telegram Search backs up a user's own Telegram messages and makes them searchable, including languages such as Chinese that Telegram's own search handles poorly. Chats are exported to PGlite or PostgreSQL, media can be saved to MinIO object storage, and messages are tokenized and embedded during export and kept in sync as new ones arrive. Search combines fuzzy matching with vector semantic search and can find images from a text description, with date filters and links back to the original message. It can also answer questions about the chat history with RAG, summarize unread messages, and work through a Telegram bot or a local-first CLI for agents. It can be self-hosted with Docker Compose, and a hosted version runs at search.lingogram.app.

Telegram Search at a glance

Best for: Social media creator, Researcher
Runs on: Web, self-hosted, open source, CLI
Pricing: Free and open source; hosted version available
Released: February 2025
Category: AI search engine
Website: search.lingogram.app

Key features

Export of Telegram chats to PGlite or PostgreSQL
Media backup to MinIO
Multilingual keyword and semantic search
Image search from text descriptions
RAG answers over chat history
Unread message summaries
Telegram bot and agent CLI

Use it for

Find an old message in a busy group chat
Back up personal Telegram history
Summarize unread messages across many chats

Alternatives to Telegram Search

Gem Search — Runs locally with open-source code and zero platform fees.
AI Toolbox — Organize, search, and export chats across four major AIs in one place.
Crawl4AI — Turns any URL into clean Markdown or typed JSON for AI models.
Jina — It provides reliable reader and search APIs optimized for LLMs and RAG systems.
Tavily — It delivers fast, secure web data retrieval designed specifically for AI agents.
chat-recall — Search every conversation and track AI findings in one place.
Anygrep — Runs locally on the CPU using EmbeddingGemma 2 without sending data away.
MemFree — It combines hybrid web search with AI summarization and page generation.
ScrapeGraphAI — Extracts structured data via natural language prompts with no selectors or proxies.
Xtract search API — Get usefulness scores and page prices before your agent fetches data.
Yahoo Scout — Save conversations and access chat history with an account.
jurl — Extracts exact page content without rewriting or hallucinating answers.

All Telegram Search alternatives