# Searching Posts and Documentation with Minisearch

> Learn how Makerkit makes it easy to add a simple search engine for your blog posts and documentation

*Canonical: https://makerkit.dev/docs/next-fire/blog-and-docs/search*

---

Makerkit's blog and documentation pages come with built-in search
functionality that does not reply on complex and expensive cloud services
such as Algolia and ElasticSearch.

Instead, we used [Minisearch](https://lucaong.github.io/minisearch/), a lightweight Javascript Search
Engine.

{% alert type="default" title="This feature has temporarily been deprecated" %}
This feature has temporarily been deprecated. Please do not use it.
{% /alert %}

### How does Minisearch work?

Instead of indexing our posts at runtime, we index all our
documentation and blog articles at build time, right after the Next.js
application has finished building.

Minisearch creates a simple index file in the `public` folder. The API loads
the index and responds to the user's query.

By default, we index two directories: `_docs` and `_posts`. Of course, it's
easy to extend this to other folders if you create more types of content.

Below you can find our indexer script that takes care of indexing
recursively our `.mdx` files in the folders provided:

 ```tsx {% title="search-indexer.ts" %}
const FIELDS = ['content', 'path', 'tag', 'title', 'collection', 'slug'];

export async function searchIndexer() {
  const miniSearch = new MiniSearch({
    fields: FIELDS,
    storeFields: FIELDS,
  });

  const engine = new SearchEngine(miniSearch);

  await engine.indexDirectory(`_posts`, (doc) => {
    return { ...doc, tag: `blog` };
  });

  await engine.indexDirectory(`_docs`, (doc) => {
    return { ...doc, tag: `docs` };
  });

  await engine.export();

  process.exit();
}
```

Assuming you have another folder named `_guides`, you could add:

 ```tsx {% title="search-indexer.ts" %}
await engine.indexDirectory(`guides`, (doc) => {
  return { ...doc, tag: `guide` };
});
```

{% video src="/assets/images/docs/search.mp4" /%}

### Does it scale?

It's important to keep the index not larger
than few MBs, otherwise it will exceed the maximum memory available to the
API function.

That could be more or less a few hundreds pieces of content (eg. articles),
so you may have some room before having to migrate.