Demo of a distributed search browser extension: IndieSearch!

[jphastings]

A few months back I built a demo of a fully decentralised and self-owned search engine that runs from your browser — built with the power of Pagefind! Check out IndieSearch

indiesearch.mp4

This demo shows:

• 🖱️ Accessing the search page direct from your extensions list
• 😔 Performing a search with no sites in your IndieSearch index (no results!)
• 🤓 (Cheatcode) Using a quick hack to add the PageFind site's search to the local index (these wouldn't be present in a proper build)
• 🔍 Searching for the word "hello" (Lots of hits of pagefind.app!)
• ❌ Marking that newly added site to be excluded from future searches
• 🤓 (Cheatcode) Adding a search index for the XKCD site to the local index
• 🔍 Searching for the word "hello" (includes XKCD but not PageFind, as it's excluded)
• 🌐 Visiting my blog
• ✨ My site is automatically added to your search index as a new site (it has the magic header!)
• 🔍 Searching for the word "hello" (includes results from my blog and XKCD, but still not PageFind)

It's still very much a prototype (I haven't even shipped it to the browser extension stores) so I'd love to hear from people who are interested in this, to help me prioritise putting more work into it.

I also wrote a little more on my blog — but hadn't realised there was a show and tell section here to add to! ☺️

[bglw]

Hi @jphastings ! 👋

Very nice! Keen to keen an eye on it 😄