I implemented search here earlier this year, using Pagefind. It’s been working out pretty well for me.
In a nice bit of independent confirmation, Tim Bray, a blogging hero of mine, just recently discovered Pagefind himself, 😲, and used it to replace Google for search on his own site.
Pagefind · Tl;dr: I downloaded it and installed it and it Just Worked out of the box. I’d describe the look and feel but that’d be a waste of time since you just tried it out. It’s fast enough and doesn’t seem to miss anything and has a decent user interface.
How it works · They advertise “fully static search library”, which I assumed meant it’s designed to work against sites like this one composed of static files. And it is, but there’s more to it than that; read on.
Of course Bray has plenty of thoughts on his approach and results. Definitely read on. I picked a bit of intel here:
The one thing that in the rear-view seems unnecessary is that I had to add a data-pagefind-meta attribute to the element at the very bottom of the page where the date is to include it in the result list. There should be a way to do this without custom markup. John Siracusa filed a related bug.
I’ve been desiring to have dates integrated into search on MPR but not the time to figure out. This seems like a hint on where to look.
Thanks! · To the folks who built this. Seems like a good thing.
Totally agree!