Inching my way towards using the Pelican static site generator for this blog, I realized that search is actually a must have. The path of least resistance seems to be to use the Tipue Search plugin. Tipue Search basically takes a statically generated search index as a big wad of JavaScript and does search client side. Not sure about the overall merits of this approach but it looks like a lot less hassle than deploying a parallel self-hosted search engine, especially after going to the trouble of static site generation to begin with. Then again, figuring the search part could be a fun side project.
Alternatively, looks like incorporating Algolia wouldn’t be too challenging.
Hat tip to this tutorial by Maxime Laboissonniere.