Pypi has fewer than one million projects. The searchable content for each package is what? 300 bytes? That's a 200mb index. You don't even need fancy full text search, you could literally split the query by word and do a grep over a text file. No need for elasticsearch or anything fancy.
And anyway, hit rates are going to be pretty good. You're not taking arbitrary queries, the domain is pretty narrow. Half the queries are going to be for requests, pytorch, numpy, httpx, and the other usual suspects.
The searchable context for a distribution on PyPI is unbounded in the general case, assuming the goal is to allow search over READMEs, distribution metadata, etc.
(Which isn’t to say I disagree with you about scale not being the main issue, just to offer some nuance. Another piece of nuance is the fact that distributions are the source of metadata but users think in terms of projects/releases.)
> assuming the goal is to allow search over READMEs, distribution metadata, etc.
Why would you build a dedicated tool for this instead of just using a search engine? If I'm looking for a specific keyword in some project's very long README I'm searching kagi, not npm.
I'd expect that the most you should be indexing is the data in the project metadata (setup.py). That could be unbounded but I can't think of a compelling reason not to truncate it beyond a reasonable length.
You would definitely use a search engine. I was just responding to a specific design constraint.
(Note PyPI can’t index metadata from a `setup.py` however, since that would involve running arbitrary code. PyPI needs to be given structured metadata, and not all distributions provide that.)
>The searchable context for a distribution on PyPI is unbounded in the general case, assuming the goal is to allow search over READMEs, distribution metadata, etc.
How does the big white search box at https://pypi.org/ work? Why couldn’t the same technology be used to power the CLI? If there’s an issue with abuse, I don’t think many people would mind rate limiting or mandatory authentication before search can be used.
The PyPI website search is implemented using a real search backend (historically Elasticsearch/OpenSearch–style infrastructure) layered behind application logic on Python Package Index. Queries are tokenized, ranked, filtered, logged, and throttled. That works fine for humans interacting through a browser.
The moment you expose that same service to a ubiquitous CLI like pip, the workload changes qualitatively.
PyPI has the /simple endpoint that the CDN can handle.
It’s PyPI philosophy that search happens on the website and pip has aligned to that. Pip doesn’t want to make a web scraper understandably so the function of searching remains disabled