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Ask HN: Database or Maybe Google Programmable Search Engine?
3 points by au246 1593 days ago
Hello HN!

Long-time lurker here. I'd appreciate some feedback on what to use, i.e., some sort of a database, or Google Programmable Search.

Background. I am putting together a website which will host files - primarily PDF at first - of publicly available information, for example, company annual reports, government notices, and other types of file formats (e.g. Excel, Word).

I am still fleshing out what problem I want this site to solve (it's broadly defined in my mind, but not laser-focused as yet).

However, what I do want is that the site - or rather the collection of documents on the site - be searchable by visitors.

I'm not a database specialist, and most websites that I do are largely static using HTML and CSS. Given the 'unstructured' data that I will be accumulating, I was reading up on NoSQL type solutions vs. traditional RDBMS.

I'd appreciate any thoughts/feedback/suggestions on what I should use for site search.

Thank you.

1 comments

You could convert them to plain text and feed a ref to the original file and the plain text to search services like algolia.
Thanks, will look into this!