Pagefind

Pagefind is a fully static search library that excels in performing well on large websites, all while minimizing the bandwidth usage for your users. What sets Pagefind apart is that it doesn't require any hosting infrastructure. Whether you're using Hugo, Eleventy, Jekyll, Next, Astro, or any other website framework, Pagefind seamlessly integrates after your website is built.

Getting started with Pagefind is incredibly simple. No extensive configuration is needed, as all you need is a folder with your website's built static files. After indexing, Pagefind adds a static search bundle to your files, providing a JavaScript search API that can be utilized anywhere on your site.

Additionally, Pagefind offers a prebuilt UI that requires no configuration. With Pagefind, even websites with tens of thousands of pages can be efficiently searched directly in the browser, using minimal bandwidth. Its search index is divided into chunks, ensuring that only a small subset of the index needs to be loaded when performing a search.

In fact, Pagefind can execute a full-text search on a 10,000 page site while maintaining a network payload under 300kB, and often even closer to 100kB. In terms of features, Pagefind offers support for multilingual websites, a powerful filtering engine for knowledge bases, custom sort attributes, custom metadata tracking, custom content weighting, and the ability to return results for specific sections of a page. It can also search across multiple domains and index various file types, including PDFs, JSON files, and subtitles, using the NodeJS indexing library.

All these features are available with the same low-bandwidth footprint. To experience the capabilities of Pagefind, you can explore the demos on large instances such as MDN, Godot documentation, and XKCD