Why we're not building our own search
tl;dr — Pagefind handles docs search. Orama (under evaluation) handles in-app wiki search. Building a custom search engine is the wrong use of our time.
The temptation
Section titled “The temptation”Every tool with a knowledge base eventually thinks “we should build search.” We have a wiki with 375+ articles. Surely custom search would be better?
No.
What we use instead
Section titled “What we use instead”Docs site search: Pagefind — runs at build time, generates a static index, ships a default UI behind Cmd+K. Zero runtime cost, typo tolerance, under 400KB. Already working.
In-app wiki search: Orama — under evaluation with hard gates (must beat lexical by 15% NDCG@10, index size under 2x, p95 latency under 50ms). If it passes, we ship it. If not, ripgrep remains the answer.
Why not @workkit?
Section titled “Why not @workkit?”We briefly considered @workkit as a search solution. @workkit is a Cloudflare Workers toolkit — it has no search capabilities. Using it for search would be inventing a library that doesn’t exist.
Decision records: ADR 0017 — No @workkit search, ADR 0014 — Orama experiment gates