Searching Feature Specs Discussion

General Feature Spec

- Why is feature important/needed??

- How do we expect the users will be using it??

- How it should look?? (UI wise)

- What are the things that should be searchable??

Users? Projects? Stories titles? Stories contents?

- Is it only an in-page small component (like how it was designed in the very very early versions)??

Or should it have it's own results page??

Technical Specs

- Where should we host this service?

Should we deploy our own instance?? (since it's an open-source project)

Or should we just use TypeSense's cloud service??

The latter option is obviously quicker & easier to setup, but maybe setting up our own instance is less costlier??? (I'm not sure about this)

- What should our data updating policy look like??

Should we immediately update the index each time some indexed item gets updated/added/deleted???

Or should we do it on an interval basis where each (say 1 hour) we check the DB to see if there has been new updates & send them all together to the Typesense Index.

The first approach guarantees almost instant updates so searching would always return the latest data, but it'll be harder to implement & I think it'll be costlier on the service.

The second approach while updates might take a while to reflect in the search, should be easier to implement & more performant overall because all the updates will be batched in a couple of requests.

(And honestly, I don't think it's really that important for our website to have instantaneous search updates)