Search

A per-tenant full-text search index built at sync time, with a Cmd/Ctrl-K command palette and an edge-cached query API.

On this page

How it works
Engine
Relationship to the AI assistant

Every Papervine site ships with full-text search over its own content. The index is built during content sync and stored per tenant, so each docs site searches only its own pages — never the platform’s or another tenant’s.

Search is part of the v1 surface area. The exact engine choice (see below) is still being finalized; the index shape — what gets indexed and the query API contract — is the stable part.

How it works

When a site syncs, Papervine extracts searchable text from every published page and writes a tenant-scoped index. The index covers:

Page titles
Headings (so results can deep-link to a #anchor)
Body prose
Code blocks

Readers query that index two ways:

Command palette

Cmd/Ctrl-K opens a command-palette UI with full keyboard navigation and recent/suggested entries. This is the primary reader-facing surface.

Query API

GET /api/search?q=… returns results for the current tenant. The endpoint is edge-cached, so repeated and popular queries are fast and cheap.

Cmd/Ctrl-K is search; Cmd/Ctrl-I is the AI assistant. They are deliberately distinct surfaces — one finds pages, the other answers questions.

Engine

The search engine is a pluggable provider, selected per tenant via config:

Orama — embeddable, runs in-process or as a service. This is the lead choice for the hosted SaaS.
Pagefind — a good fit for static-leaning setups.
Algolia — supported as an alternative provider for tenants that already run it.

Because the index is built from your synced content rather than a proprietary store, the provider can change without changing your source files.

Relationship to the AI assistant

The same indexed content also backs search_docs, the retrieval tool the AI assistant and the read MCP server use to answer questions. Keyword search powers both the human-facing palette and the agentic retrieval loop; a semantic (embeddings) backend can be added later behind the same search_docs contract without changing how either surface calls it.