Tipue, the JavaScript Search

on Technology

Tipue is a browser based JavaScript site search that allows you to add search to your site without adding any server side code.

What you would normally do with a third party search provider like Google Custom Search Engine or server side search software like Solr you do with a small JavaScript file.

There are two major downsides: Tipue wants to get you up and running fast, so the HTML generation is built-in, if you aren’t happy with the HTML it generates this might mean editing the JavaScript, and because it’s a relatively small JavaScript file it doesn’t carry the same querying and indexing functionality you’d expect from a dedicated search solution.

Querying

  • Entering a sentence without any special characters searches for documents that contain every word entered
  • Exact Search: You can specify an exact phrase using quotes, for example “Fender Bender”
  • Exclude: You can exclude a word using a minus sign, for example -Fender

Indexing

Tipue can build/retrieve its index in three ways:

  • Static means that you provide Tipue with the index which is a JSON file
  • JSON is the same as Static only you provide Tipue with a URL to the JSON file
  • Live means that you provide Tipue with a list of URLs for it to index

HTML Generation

The HTML generated isn’t semantic, it’s mostly divs with classes, below is an example search item:

<div class="tipue_search_content_title">
	<a href="http://www.tipue.com/search">Tipue Search, a site search engine jQuery plugin</a>
</div>
<div class="tipue_search_content_url">
	<a href="http://www.tipue.com/search">www.tipue.com/search</a>
</div>
<div class="tipue_search_content_text">
	<span class="h01">Tipue</span> Search is a site search engine jQuery plugin. It's free, open source, responsive and fast. Tipue Search only needs a browser that supports ...
</div>

Most of the rest of the outputted HTML is similar, aside from the paging which uses an unordered list.

I’d really like them to have a function that allows you to query using their search capability and generate your own HTML, or at the very least offer some sort of HTML templating.

Performance

This is going to be an issue if your site is large, however for my little blog it’s lightning fast, try it yourself.

Generating the index with Pretzel

I use Pretzel to generate my blog and so it made sense for me to do write a Pretzel plugin to generate the Tipue Index. You can find that plugin here.

Try the search out and let me know what you think in the comments below.