Provide a search bar

[stone-zeng]

It will be helpful to have the function for searching in the website, for example when one wants to find the usage of some commands, etc.

[josephwright]

Part of the design aspect, so one for Jonas.

[jonasjacek]

I was wrapping my head around this for some time. The search I used for latex-project.org is from Google (Google Custom Search). Is it ok to use it for learnlatex.org, too?

[davidcarlisle]

@jonasjacek yes I think a google custom site search should be enough, (that's also what we have at texfaq.org)

[dbitouze]

There are folks who don't want to rely on Google and who use e.g. DuckDuckGo to search on the Web. They probably would be reluctant to search on learnlatex if the only way would be via Google.

[jonasjacek]

DuckDuck has a similar service to Google.

There is also an option to use a service like Algolia. Implementation is a lot more work though. It's on the other end of the spectrum, compared to Google/DuckDuck.

[stone-zeng]

Note that in china mainland google and duckduck are not available, unfortunately.

[jonasjacek]

Note that in china mainland google and duckduck are not available, unfortunately.

Does Baidu offer a similar service?

[stone-zeng]

Does Baidu offer a similar service?

I think bing is ok.

[dbitouze]

I think bing is ok.

@stone-zeng Well, I guess Bing (Microsoft) would not be better received than Google.

[jonasjacek]

At least Bing Custom search is supposedly ad free.

[jonasjacek]

Update

DuckDuckGo

I've chosen DuckDuckG for now as they allow to disable ads, customize the result page via simple URL parameters, and do not require account creation. Also, privacy of users will profit. Love it. Important: As of now, DuckDuckGo is configure to look up results for latex-project.org, as learnlatex.org is (purposely) blocking search engine crawlers via robots.txt, which means we will not see any results for now. This will be changed later.

See: https://github.com/learnlatex/learnlatex.github.io/blob/design/_includes/search-box.html

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Google

Although I've tried to create a Google custom search engine (CSE). Unfortunately, I did not receive any emails from them to confirm my account creation. 👎 Also, contains ads.

Bing

Second choice, also requires account creation. Contains ads.

Baidu

Requires account creation with a Chinese mobile phone number. I am blocked. If anyone wants to help, ping me. Probably contains ads.

Algolia

In case we switch to Netlify, there is now an official search plugin for Algolia on Netlify. Algolia may be free of charge as "qualifying open source and non-profit projects can use Algolia at a discount or for free". There's also a Jekyll plugin which we might be able to use on GitHub as well.

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Summary

Right now, I am happy with DuckDuckGo, although contrasts could be better for some search result page (SERP) elements, which I am not able to style via parameters. I am considering contacting them about that.

Search box design work has not started yet, only the result page design has been worked on. My focus was branding (colors) and on accessibility (contrasts, font sizes, etc.)

[jonasjacek]

@josephwright & @davidcarlisle, could please contact Algolia and ask if we can use Algolia for free? There is an application form on this page (we may need to create an account first). This would solve the challenges we see in offering search for e.g. China.