Improve search without adding infra

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Hey, I am an experience dev but I don’t have much time to fiddle around with this particular non-profit page for a local newspaper that is paid for and hosted with Ghost Pro. They want better search. The reccomended Algolia solution seems a bit too clunky. I don’t need anything fancy and I definitely don’t want more infrastructure to maintain. The site doesn’t even have 1000 posts and only adds one each day so I can’t imagine there would be any issues with performance.

The page is www.sollia.net with this version Version: 5.120.3-0-g2652d4bd+moya I assume since I am on Pro we have the latest version…? (really hands off with this one)

My question is, could I simply implement this in the front end so that I fetch more than the regular search intends?

My friend claude says I could: How claude-4-sonnet wants to improve search on Ghost · GitHub and yes I know the code probably won’t work, but is the idea sound?

Is this a horrible idea?

I find the Algolia thing works pretty well and runs for in free tiers.

Is it a horrible idea to modify the sodo-search package to search full-text? Hard to say. Depends a lot of the size of the posts, remembering that the sodo-search app actually loads and parses the post content in the browser, which might be an older phone on 3G.

Is it a horrible idea to post a link to your AI-generated code and ask other people to spend uncompensated time reviewing it? Yes. That’s definitely a horrible idea.

p.s. Your friend claude might want to know that it’s possible to not load sodo-search, by passing an ‘exclude’ argument to ghost_head.

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Ahaha can’t blame a guy for trying but I get your point :) In my defense it seems like a feature that could be useful for others if I can make it work.

Thanks for the pointers, I will see if I can make sense of it, just desperately don’t want to make my product any harder to work with. Not my usual stack this.