[jil]

It doesn’t do live crawling, so might not be quite what you want, but I built Stork Search (https://stork-search.net) to solve full-text search for static sites.

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.

[ezekg]

I actually tried Stork this morning after reading about it on console.dev awhile back (it's been on my list). I had high hopes, but I found the result sets to be a bit less-than-stellar for technical docs, and typing performance also seemed to take a hit. Both of these may totally be on me -- possibly due to the fact I didn't optimize any settings, and maybe my index size. But that's actually why I'm here... I just got tired of tinkering. I want something I don't need to tinker with.

If those things can be improved, I'd love to be a beta tester for a hosted solution. I'd love to not have to handle this myself.

[ezekg]

Follow up: I spent more time with Stork last night and I think I have it in a decent place. And after some fine tuning regarding indexed content, and some brotli/gzip compression, the index size isn't too bad (<3MB vs >30MB). Still having issues around excluding elements from the index, but maybe I'll spend some more time here when I can.

I'm definitely interested in a hosted solution that "just works" so I don't need to keep tinkering with it.