The challenge of searching static websites is effectively a solved problem with brilliant, yet widely unadopted, solutions.

These projects scan and index your content at build time and ship it to the browser with the rest of your static files. No out-of-your-control external service required. A small library in JavaScript (sometimes accompanied by WebAssembly) loads the index and allows instant searching and works just fine offline. Searching the complete Federalist Papers for multiple keywords takes less than 100µs in my Wasm tech demo (I’ll get to that later on).

The most popular libraries are written in JavaScript like Lunr, or Fuse, or FlexSearch. They provide pre-compiled indexes and fuzzy, wildcard, and boolean searches. They have good documentation and are ready for production usage.

But I’m more interested in how the up-and-coming Wasm-powered projects work. Browser search is a space where Wasm can really find an edge. Wasm runs faster, loads quicker, and ships smaller binaries (in theory, in practice it takes some work to get there)…

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