Site Search

Built sites include a working search page at /search/, generated per language at build time, backed by a static JSON index, and searched entirely in the visitor’s browser. This page covers how it works and how it stays current.

How it works

• The builder writes a search index (<language>/search-index.json) containing every published page and post in that language: the entry type, title, absolute URL, and an excerpt (the author’s excerpt when supplied; otherwise a 160-character summary generated from the body).
• The search page (rendered from search.tt, with your theme’s header and footer) loads that index client-side and matches the visitor’s q= query locally: no server round-trip, no search backend, nothing to configure.

What’s searchable

• Published pages and posts, per language. Each index entry carries the title, result URL, and excerpt, so what matches is exactly what a visitor reads in the listing.
• Indexes are scoped by language: a search under a language’s /search/ never surfaces results in another language (consistent with the per-language output model).
• Excerpts come from the author’s own excerpt field when set, else the auto-generated summary; the same text used in listings and feeds, so search previews match what a click-through shows.

Always current

The index is regenerated on every build, incremental builds too, so the search results reflect exactly the content that was last promoted. Publish, rebuild, and search sees it.

Utility-page details

• /search/ pages are marked noindex by the builder, so they never appear in sitemaps or crawler listings.
• The service worker (PWA) also pre-caches the search page per language, so search renders from cache offline, matching queries against the bundled index.
• The header’s search form targets the same /search/ URL with a q= parameter, in every language vhost.

CMS-side searches (a related but separate system)

The admin area has its own search surfaces (the Library’s block search, the documents listing search, and the API’s /api/search endpoint for scripts) but those search the database and are administered. The public search page is the built one described here.