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Tutorial: put Wikipedia on your PC — and search it offline

By the end of this tutorial you'll have an encyclopedia living on your own hard drive, searchable in SearchBox with no internet connection at all. It sounds like magic; it's actually just one file.

You'll need: SearchBox installed and set up (getting started), some disk space, and a little patience during indexing.

Step 1 — Understand what a ZIM file is

A ZIM file is an entire website packed into a single file — articles, images, links and all. The Kiwix project publishes free ZIM files of Wikipedia and many other sites so people can read them offline. SearchBox can open these files and make every article searchable.

Step 2 — Download a ZIM file

  1. Open the Kiwix library at library.kiwix.org.
  2. Search the library for "Simple English Wikipedia" — it's a few gigabytes and perfect for a first try. (The full English Wikipedia also works, but it's around a hundred gigabytes and takes correspondingly longer to download and index — work up to it.)
  3. Download the .zim file and note where it lands, e.g. C:\Users\you\Downloads\wikipedia_en_simple_all.zim.

💡 Tip: Kiwix offers "mini" and "nopic" (no pictures) editions of many wikis — smaller files, faster indexing, same searchable text.

Step 3 — Index it in SearchBox

  1. In SearchBox, click the upload button (arrow icon, top-right).
  2. Switch to the Index ZIM/ZIP tab.
  3. Type or paste the full path to your .zim file.
  4. Click Index Archive.

The Index ZIM/ZIP tab with a wikipedia .zim path entered

A banner appears while SearchBox works through the articles. Simple English Wikipedia takes a while — this is a one-time cost, so let it run; the bell will notify you when it finishes.

The indexing banner while a ZIM archive is processed

Step 4 — Search the encyclopedia

Try something you'd normally google:

photosynthesis

Wikipedia articles show up alongside your own files, marked with a ZIM Archive source label.

Search results including Wikipedia articles from the ZIM

Step 5 — Read an article

Click any article result. It opens right inside SearchBox — with pictures and working links to other articles, all served from the ZIM file on your disk. Click around; you're browsing Wikipedia with the network cable unplugged, so to speak.

A Wikipedia article open in the SearchBox viewer

Ideas for what to index next

The Kiwix library is bigger than Wikipedia: WikiHow, Wiktionary, Stack Exchange collections, Project Gutenberg books, medical references. Anything there becomes part of your private search engine — useful for travel, spotty connections, or simply owning your reference library.

🔒 As always: downloading the ZIM is the only online step. Indexing, searching, and reading all happen entirely on your machine.

← Back to the manual