Site Search

Files: src/config/config.toml, page frontmatter, src/i18n/<language>.json · Skill level: Beginner

Visitors open search with ⌘ + K (Mac), Ctrl + K (Windows and Linux), or / when they aren’t typing in a field. They can also click Search in the strip along the bottom of the Pages menu, in the header and in the phone menu, or the search button on the journal page. Results are grouped into projects, services, journal, and pages, and each language searches its own pages: on /fr/, search finds French pages.

With the field still empty, search works as a quick menu: the pages of the header menu, then a light or dark switch, copy email, and a link to the other language.

Search is powered by Pagefind. It runs in the browser from an index made at the end of npm run build, so there is no search service to pay for or set up.

Settings

[settings.search]
  enable  = true
  exclude = ["/components/"] # path prefixes to leave out of the index

Prefixes ignore the language, so "/team/" also leaves out /fr/team/ and /ar/team/. /components/ is a sample page of the Markdown shortcodes, left out on purpose.

Leave A Page Out

Add excludeFromSearch: true to the page’s frontmatter. Some pages are left out automatically:

pages marked noindex, such as /elements/, and pages without the site header
paginated, category, and tag listings of the journal, because they only repeat their entries

Only the main content of each page is indexed. The header, the footer, and the call to action are not, so every result points to real content.

Change The Wording

The texts of the search window (placeholder, “no results”, the group names) are under search in src/i18n/<language>.json, for example search.placeholder (“Search or jump to a page”). Change them in every language.

Turn Search Off

Set enable = false. The search window and its buttons disappear, including the Search link in the Pages menu.

That link is a quick link in the menu file: an item in bar.links with "action": "search" and "shortcut": "⌘K", the key hint shown beside it. You can move it to another mega menu or remove it in each src/config/menu.<language>.json. See Navigation. The build still runs Pagefind, which costs a few seconds and does no harm.

Do It With AI

Leave these pages out of site search on my Margo site: [PAGES]. Add excludeFromSearch: true to
their content files in every language folder of src/content/, or add their path prefix to
exclude under [settings.search] in src/config/config.toml if it is a whole folder. Then run
npm run build and npm run preview, and tell me how to check it.