One of my backburner projects for the last few years has been building a better search engine for my Hugo-powered site. It needed to be able to integrate with Hugo, and to run on a commodity webserver (so no NodeJS nonsense etc.)
The previous .json index strategy wasn’t sustainable - a .json search index was generated every time my site was built (yay!) and it got downloaded in the browser when someone wanted to search the site. Which worked, but slowly got unwieldy. The .json index is now over 7MB in size - and that downloads before you can search, with the javascript search taking place inside your browser. I needed a better solution before this just failed outright due to the size of the index.
I just Claude-coded a new search tool that converts my previous .json index into an SQLite database that sits on the server, with a separate PHP API managing requests to it.
It’s running now at https://darcynorman.net/search
Claude Code built the whole thing and integrated it with my Hugo site. It even added a feature I hadn’t thought of yet - being able to filter the search by content type.
Anyway. Vibecoding. Claude-coding. Whatever. It solved a need I’ve had for years, in about 30 minutes of on-the-floor conversation with Claude Code in Terminal.
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