Zr Alternatives

zr reviews and mentions

• ZR – offline and serverless stackoverflow/man/etc. low memory search
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Apr 2022
• A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Sep 2021

  Amazing!

  I have only one recommendation that might make the search a bit more relevant, e.g when searching for 'linux locking' or 'kernel locking' kind of things.

  Try to upsort things that match near the top of the content, like the top of the man page vs middle vs bottom.

  One easy way to do it without having to store the positions, is to index the ngrams with max(sqrt,8) of their line number, this will cover first 64 lines, you can also use log() or just decide ad hock, top, middle, bottom of the document, so you can use only 3 values.

  e.g. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.0/kernel-hacking/locking.... would do unreliable_1 guide_1 locking_1 ... then at line 4 kernel_2 locking_2 ... after line 50 ... then_7 ... and after that everything will be _8.

  then just make the query "kernel locking" to "dismax(kernel_1 OR kernel_2 OR kernel_3...) AND dismax(locking_1 OR locking_2 ...) with some tiebreaker of 0.1 or so, you can also say "i want to upsort things on the same line, or few lines apart" by modifying the query a bit.

  It works really well and costs very little in terms of space, i tried it at https://github.com/jackdoe/zr while searching all of stackoverfow/man pages and etc and was pretty surprised by the result.

  This approach is a bit cheaper than storing the positions because positions are (lets say) 4 bytes per term per doc, while this approach has fixed uppre bound cost of 8*4 per document (assuming 4 byte document ids)