What's the benefit of index-free?
Libsearch: Simple index-free full-text search for JavaScript
11–20 of 21 posts
Re: Libsearch: Simple index-free full-text search for JavaScript
#12What's the benefit of index-free?
much lower memory use, and instant startup time
Re: Libsearch: Simple index-free full-text search for JavaScript
#13Re: Libsearch: Simple index-free full-text search for JavaScript
#14I never realized search like this was this easy to build in a way.
It’s a very clever RegEx engine, essentially. Though it’s unclear to me right now how will this library handles fuzzy search (e.g. Califnia instead of California) but it’s really cool to reason about its implementation
Re: Libsearch: Simple index-free full-text search for JavaScript
#15With FlexSearch or lunr or similar, building an index is so fast for “thousands of items” that it’s fine to do it when the user opens a search interface and forget it once they’re done.
Any non in-memory search indices? Was hoping to find one that used indexeddb to implement fuzzy search. Maybe that’s just not as performant which is why I haven’t found a popular library yet.
Re: Libsearch: Simple index-free full-text search for JavaScript
#16With FlexSearch or lunr or similar, building an index is so fast for “thousands of items” that it’s fine to do it when the user opens a search interface and forget it once they’re done.
Any non in-memory search indices? Was hoping to find one that used indexeddb to implement fuzzy search. Maybe that’s just not as performant which is why I haven’t found a popular library yet.
Many years ago, when I was building Lunr, it was initially based on IndexedDB, but it was _much_ slower and the datasets I had in mind easily fit in memory so I didn’t pursue it. No idea if that has changed since though.
Re: Libsearch: Simple index-free full-text search for JavaScript
#17Look like grep.
Re: Libsearch: Simple index-free full-text search for JavaScript
#18I'm often using Fuse in my JS apps. So many in-app searchs cannot handle typing errors, it's frustrating.
Fuse is terrible performance-wise. There are many better options
https://github.com/nextapps-de/flexsearch?tab=readme-ov-file...
I tried Fuse, lunr and MiniSearch, and I stayed with MiniSearch. Great flexibility and very good performance even when I am indexing almost a million documents + many useful features.
Also, I would also recommend giving FlexSearch a try, it has some fancy algorithm that supposedly makes searches extra fast https://github.com/nextapps-de/flexsearch?tab=readme-ov-file...
Re: Libsearch: Simple index-free full-text search for JavaScript
#19I'm often using Fuse in my JS apps. So many in-app searchs cannot handle typing errors, it's frustrating.
Fuse is terrible performance-wise. There are many better options https://github.com/nextapps-de/flexsearch?tab=readme-ov-file... I tried Fuse, lunr and MiniSearch, and I stayed with MiniSearch. Great flexibility and very good performance even when I am indexing almost a million documents + many useful features. Also, I would also recommend giving FlexSearch a try, it has some fancy algorithm that supposedly makes sea…
yes, Fuse is extremely slow (and FlexSearch is very fast after indexing is done), but i have no idea how that table presents FlexSearch as having the lowest memory footprint, maybe in its default config?
in my testing of fuzzy/substring matching it takes quite a while to create its huge index: https://github.com/leeoniya/uFuzzy?tab=readme-ov-file#perfor...
Re: Libsearch: Simple index-free full-text search for JavaScript
#20this is 115 lines of TS, which is pretty lightweight, but some other impt table stakes might be missing that you should be aware of. see all the JS alternatives with their sizes and feature sets and perf: https://github.com/leeoniya/uFuzzy (scroll to bottom) i went down this path a few yrs ago and ended up picking ufuzzy: https://swyxkit.netlify.app/ufuzzy-search
thanks, glad you like it. you might be interested in doing a follow-up/update to your post, to use the .search() api, which does more stuff out of the box, such as outOfOrder, quoted, and negatives Libsearch looks similar to uFuzzy (indexless regexp builder) but more simplistic. the other one i've seen that does this is sifter.js (predates uFuzzy, but i didnt discover it until researching libs to compare afterwards)
your readme is the gold star in readmes, i hope you keep doing more oss work!