Having recently migrated my old WordPress site to Hugo, I was wondering if I’d written a post about a certain topic and wished I had search functionality. Sure, I could just use Google to search my site but that’s boring. I’ve been thinking about search a lot at work lately and I wondered just how commodotized semantic search really is – the challenge I gave myself was adding good search functionality while committing to spend as little money on it as possible. rc3.org is already hosted on Cloudflare Pages for free, which is pretty incredible, honestly.
Of course I also used Claude Code to build the search feature, which sped things up but didn’t keep the project from becoming frustrating at times along the way. I asked Claude to create a separate write up of the project that you can look at. I don’t know why I find these entertaining, but I do.
I’ve set up semantic search for a few test apps lately just for fun, so I had a really clear idea on what the build would be like. The challenge was picking the right tools for this particular use case. There are basically three components – a script to index the content, a vector search engine, and a BFF to wrap the search engine, pull in my API keys, etc.