Algolia search implementation

[leroy]

Algolia is a search engine with offers a free service for opensource projects.

https://www.algolia.com/for-open-source/

Algolia would greatly improve the UX on the docs.

Example of a readthedocs implementation:
readthedocs/sphinx_rtd_theme#761

I would love to create a PR if the maintainers are open to this.

Some credentials would have to be requesters by the maintainers.

[Calinou]

On paper, it sounds good to me but we'll need to apply for an open source plan first.

Keep in mind we use an "instant search" plugin that makes a search modal pop up when you click the search field. The Algolia implementation should probably remove this instant search plugin in favor of the popup displayed by the Algolia plugin.

[leroy]

@Calinou Let me know if i can help out in any way. Would love to create a PR.

See:
https://tailwindcss.com/

For an example implementation of the search

[leroy]

I went ahead and started building a prototype.

I also applied for the public crawling program to be able to build a demo with real data. Will follow up with a PR soon!

[leroy]

@Calinou i applied for the DocSearch project of Algolia.

I just received an e-mail confirming the setup is complete on their end.

See:

https://github.com/algolia/docsearch-configs/blob/master/configs/godotengine.json

[LikeLakers2]

I'm not a Godot team member, so I'm not sure how much weight my words would carry, but I'm not entirely sure I see the need for an AI-powered search? While using the docs search function isn't always great (it seems it tends towards non-class-ref pages before class ref pages), I think it gets the job done. I'm not sure why we'd want to fix what (in my eyes, at least) isn't broken.

Mind you, I'm not against it. I just wanted to voice that I'm not sure I understand why we'd want it.

[Calinou]

Mind you, I'm not against it. I just wanted to voice that I'm not sure I understand why we'd want it.

The current search results are pretty bad when you use short search terms such as "input". I'm confident that using Algolia could deliver better search results.

However, Algolia is proprietary SaaS we don't control. This is a reason why Akien isn't especially favorable to using it. If Algolia stops providing free plans for open source projects in the future, we'll have to go back to the old search system.

[leroy]

Mind you, I'm not against it. I just wanted to voice that I'm not sure I understand why we'd want it.

My number one reason is the current UX of the search and the responsiveness of the search results. I'm all up for finding a better solution for that instead of using "Algolia's AI powered search".

[Calinou]

@leroy After some discussion, we decided that it'd be a good idea to try out Algolia on the /latest branch. If it turns out to work well, we can then deploy it to other versions (/stable at least, which holds the same contents as /3.2 right now).

However, if I'm reading correctly, configs/godotengine.json is configured to index the /stable branch. Should I open a pull request to index the /latest branch there instead?

[leroy]

@Calinou Wooo! That's great news! Very cool to hear you guys are open to the concept. I think that's a proper way to request the change. I'll make sure to send the Algolia team an e-mail aswell.

I think if you decide to go ahead with using Algolia we can look into getting a Algolia indexer to run on push through Github Actions instead of the opensource one. But that's for another time.

[Calinou]

@leroy I updated the indexing in algolia/docsearch-configs#3977. Could you open a pull request against this repository's master branch with the required changes to add Algolia? Thanks in advance 🙂

[mhilbrunner]

We've since implemented Algolia search (see above PR) and also disabled it again. Stumbled upon this issue as I was spelunking in search stuff. RTD's new Beta search may be worth a try. Anyway, going to close this issue now :)