128 karma · joined January 7, 2019
https://twitter.com/jameslittle230
Today, you’d run a binary as part of a site’s build or deploy process, feeding in the input files. It generates a search index which you deploy alongside your site. The project’s JS library will load that index and turn it into a client-side interactive search interface.
I’d be curious to see if this sounds interesting or workable for you - you mentioned that you don’t want to host your own index, but does that change if “hosting the index” feels similar to hosting an image, instead of spinning up a server?
I’d be interested in building a paid addition that will crawl your site & host the index - you’re probably the 2nd person I’ve seen with that suggestion. Please let me know if you’d be interested in being a beta user.
For now (and I haven't tried this for self-hosting, so use at your own risk) -- the whole project (incl. the final JS file and the WASM blob) can be built from source. Tweaking the build a little bit would probably get you most of the way there.
Definitely something I'll try experimenting with in the future, so... watch this space, perhaps?
Refreshing might work, but no promises? Or you could try my personal site's search bar: https://jameslittle.me/search/
They're very similar and share a lot of principles, though Matthias went full-on towards the algorithmic aspect and I focused on the experience of including the UI (copy-pastable from the code on the home page) and building a search index.
I think WASM-aided in-browser search is really exciting! There are clear benefits for content creators (embedding search on a Jamstack site has historically been tricky) and for users alike (Caching & offline support is pretty rad if your users are doing a lot of searching). I'm excited to see Matthias' project get attention here!