Searchable

Searchable builds a static search index ahead of time and searches it in the browser. It provides search-service features without a query-time server, hosted API, or per-query bill. Try the live feature gallery to see real generated indexes searched by the browser client.

Why Searchable

• Deploy the index beside any static site or CMS export.
• Keep user queries in the browser.
• Fetch immutable, content-hashed shards only when a query needs them.
• Use an open JSON-first index format with independent TypeScript and Python producers.
• Add richer search without adopting an application framework.

What it supports

• BM25F lexical ranking, field and document boosts, prefix queries, quoted phrases, and fuzzy matching
• Terms, range, and hierarchical facets with contextual counts
• Query-time synonyms and editorial term-to-page pins
• English, German, Swedish, Dutch, Bokmål, and Nynorsk analysis plus fallback segmenters for CJK and Southeast Asian scripts
• Web Worker execution, cancellation, streaming partial results, highlighting, and lifecycle events
• Service Worker caching for offline search
• Optional binary term, fuzzy, and document-store shards
• Vector and hybrid search with injectable embeddings or the optional Transformers integration

Public preview

The npm and Python packages are not yet published. Evaluate the implemented search surfaces in the live feature gallery or work with the repository directly:

git clone https://github.com/ktjn/searchable.git
cd searchable
corepack enable
pnpm install
pnpm build
pnpm test

The package manifests are prepared for a coordinated first npm release at 1.0.0. Until that release exists, do not use the package names in production installation commands.

API shape

The planned package API builds and publishes an index, then creates a client that points at its manifest:

import { SearchClient } from "@ktjn/searchable-client";

const search = new SearchClient({
  indexUrl: "/search-index/manifest.json",
  worker: true,
  workerUrl: new URL("/assets/worker.js", location.href),
});

const result = await search.search("getting started");
for (const hit of result.hits) {
  console.log(hit.fields.title, hit.url);
}

See First search for a complete path and Indexing content for index production.

Documentation

• Overview
• Installation
• Guides
• Architecture
• Client API
• Configuration
• Roadmap

Development

Requires Node.js 24 or newer and pnpm 11.

pnpm install
pnpm build
pnpm test
pnpm typecheck
pnpm lint

Python reference implementations live in python/searchable-analysis and python/searchable-indexer and use uv for development. Contributions should preserve deterministic output and cross-implementation conformance; see Project governance.

See Contributing before opening a pull request and report security issues through the private process in Security.

Status

The implemented package surface is prepared for a planned first npm release at 1.0.0, but it is not yet published. The lexical, facet, synonym, fuzzy, pinning, worker, offline, binary-storage, and vector/hybrid surfaces described in these docs are implemented. Planned work is collected only in the roadmap; historical investigations and superseded specifications live under docs/archive/.

License

MIT