Hacker News Reader

Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

It's mentioned in this post but lunr.js is a clever option if you don't have much content. The idea is that your search page has to create a json object with all your content and lunr will build an index out of it client-side. This sounds like terrible architecture but you could stuff about 100 blog posts into an object the size of one big jpeg. For a few dozen articles it's pretty snappy.

View on HN

Yeah that's a pretty useful trick.

Sphinx, the Python documentation engine, does something like that - e.g. https://datasette.readthedocs.io/en/stable/search.html?q=fts... which runs off this generated JavaScript index file: https://datasette.readthedocs.io/en/stable/searchindex.js

A few dozen articles? I've seen examples with Fuse.js and Hugo searching over 10,000 articles and it is fast. No server-side components required.

I think most people (me included) underestimate how ridiculously tiny raw text is compared to other common file types.

Great way to botch user experience since the user has to download the index.

There are ways to optimize this per section, alphabetically, etc. Otherwise Xapian is very easy to setup and would be my goto over Elasticsearch.

You can also do the lunr index creation server side, with lib in php or python, generating a quite smaller file and also reducing processing time on the client side.

I've been developing a podcast hosting solution that parses the xml feed, generate static pages and prebuilds a lunr index, and for ~100 posts, it takes around 30 seconds to build server side and less than a second to download and and load on the client.

What's the file size of the index? Is it just encoded in JSON?

Yes, it's encoded json for lunr.js. Here's the index for my static-site blog: https://blog.kevinastone.com/search_index.json. It's 305kb un-compressed at the moment (38kb gzipped).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com