I am looking into migrating my site from WordPress to Jekyll and would like to maintain the ability to have full-text search for the site. The WordPress search was fast, reliable, and nicely formatted to match the theme, and I haven’t found a decent replacement.
There’s a plugin solution that uses indextank, but I am not interested in tying my search through a commercial API with users ranking the search items, I just want something comparable to WordPress search.
I’ve also looked into the google Ajax api, but I don’t want a floating ajax search box on the site.
There’s always google’s search for the website, but I haven’t found this to be as reliable. (I haven’t tried this since I moved to wordpress a few years ago, so perhaps I’m mistaken).
Since all posts are available in plain-text, it seems like it should not be to difficult to create an index for searching them when the site is built, but I have not found a good solution. Any suggestions or examples?
One option to investigate Google Custom Search.
You mention trying to use Google in the past, but I’m not sure if you mean the custom search box as described here. Posting this in case it helps.