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Show HN: Self-Hostable Algolia DocSearch Replacement
Interactive demo:
https://getcanary.dev/docs/cloud/demo https://getcanary.dev/docs/cloud/demo
Canary works with local search indexes like Pagefind too:
https://getcanary.dev/docs/local/demo https://getcanary.dev/docs/local/demo
For both demo, you'll find small "code" tab to see actual code to build the search UI.
Self-hosting guide: https://getcanary.dev/docs/cloud/self-host https://getcanary.dev/docs/cloud/self-host
Would love to hear any feedback!
- johntopia 2y agoHow did you manage to keep the size so small :O
- yujonglee 2y agothanks for noticing! 1. All UI components are written using Lit (lit.dev). 2. I put a lot of effort into making the components as composable as possible, so you can load only what you need. For anyone interested, we have a chart here: https://getcanary.dev/docs/why#tiny-components-that-work-anywhere https://getcanary.dev/docs/why#tiny-components-that-work-any...
- skeptrune 2y agoThis is sweet. I do think the styling on the component could be a bit cleaner though.
- yujonglee 2y agoThanks! Could you point out any specific part of the UI that you think could be improved?
- techn00 2y agoOpening up the search needs a softer animation. Take https://ui.shadcn.com/ https://ui.shadcn.com/ as an example
- yujonglee 2y agogot it. I will add some animation in default `canary-modal` implementation. just FYI - i's very easy to implement custom modal component and swap out the default one. https://github.com/fastrepl/canary/blob/72723b0/js/apps/docs/components/CloudSearch.vue#L59-L60 https://github.com/fastrepl/canary/blob/72723b0/js/apps/docs...
- Onavo 2y agoYou should add support for tinkerbird, so the index can be statically generated and queried without a backend. https://github.com/wizenheimer/tinkerbird https://github.com/wizenheimer/tinkerbird
- whilenot-dev 2y agoJust played around with tinkerbird on Tinkerboard[0]... it doesn't seem to get good results with the provided example data. Why do you think a support for it would be worthwhile? [0]: https://tinkerboard.vercel.app/ https://tinkerboard.vercel.app/
- Onavo 2y agoGetting good results involves tuning, good models, and well defined prompts, the demo not implementing a good RAG has nothing to do with its vector search performance. I suggest reading up on how the technology works.
- hackernewds 2y agoThe name Canary is a bit confusing, since a lot of companies already use Canary to indicate symptoms of issues (re: canary in coal mine). However the app doesn't fulfill this need. I will give it a try, impressive compression
- yujonglee 2y agothat's a fair point. I don't think I can rename it at this point, but I'll keep in mind that some people might be confused by the name. please do try it out, and come to Discord if you want to chat.
- hackernewds 2y agoHow does it compare to Glean?
- yujonglee 2y agoGlean is used for searching the workspace (AFAIK, for internal use). Canary is used for searching technical documentation, GitHub issues, etc., and is intended for the users of the project.
- ij23 2y agoCanary is awesome! we use Canary for our doc search at LiteLLM (you can see it here: https://docs.litellm.ai/docs/ https://docs.litellm.ai/docs/) It's really useful to be able to specify the search space for a specific query (example: Canary allows search for the query "sagemaker" on our docs or on our github issues )
- jgalt212 2y agoI have to say Algolia is underwhelming (even after all these years). Perhaps I'm using it wrong, but I often more quickly find the comment or story I'm searching for via a targeted search using Google. I should give Bing a try as I've been been getting better finance related results there lately--especially when trying to locate ratings and / or other docs related to newly issued securities.
- lnrdgmz 2y agoAgreed. I dread having to use Algolia search on documentation these days. The search results feel pretty naively selected, and the UI is pretty poor. I get that people want to deploy static sites, but can we please find a way to bring back search _pages_?
- yujonglee 2y ago> I dread having to use Algolia search on documentation these days. agreed. > but can we please find a way to bring back search _pages_? could you please explain what do you mean?
- bryanrasmussen 2y agoI had to use Algolia in a recent ecommerce solution, I think e-commerce really is the sweet spot for what Algolia offers, quick setup not a lot of need to mess around with your rankings etc. with very simple content. I'm used to Solr and ElasticSearch for most sites I've ran, which tend to be information sites dense where you need to be able to control rankings to get the best results, which HN is much closer to than to an e-commerce site.
- shooker435 2y agoHave you tried Vertex AI Search for Retail?
- bryanrasmussen 2y agono
- TnS-hun 2y agoIn Firefox the "Search for anything" input does not get focused after opening the search dialog.
- yujonglee 2y agonice catch! just downloaded firework to test it :) will fix it shortly
- uwemaurer 2y agolooks interesting. there is a typo in the headline ("techincal docs") on https://getcanary.dev/ https://getcanary.dev/
- yujonglee 2y agothanks, fixed!
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y agoDoes it have the same API? Have been looking for a way to mock the service in development
- yujonglee 2y agoNo, it use different API with Algolia DocSearch. > Have been looking for a way to mock the service in development This is what I wanted too! So we have multiple providers, including `canary-provider-mock`. So you can use it to mock it in the dev. example: https://github.com/noxify/renoun-docs-template/blob/055b54/src/components/canary-search.tsx#L66-L71 https://github.com/noxify/renoun-docs-template/blob/055b54/s...
- simonw 2y agoTook me a little poking around to figure out what the underlying search engine was: it's https://typesense.org/ https://typesense.org/ hosted in a Docker container.
- yujonglee 2y agoYes, we initially started with Paradedb but moved to Typesense for a search-as-you-type experience. We also have an additional layer for query transformation using an LLM though. (only when query is "question-like". e.g: if you go to 'https://docs.litellm.ai/ https://docs.litellm.ai/' and search for 'how to limit API cost,' it will map the query to 'budget.'
- pjot 2y agoCan you talk about how you implemented search-as-you-type? Doing so with semantic search seems tricked given the roundtrips needed to compute embeddings on the fly (assuming the use of OpenAI embeddings)
- yujonglee 2y agosure - implementing a search-as-you-type experience with an ai-powered feature was what i wanted to do as well. it doesn't use embeddings at the moment. when you type a short query like 'openai,' it simply runs a basic query using Typesense. however, if you enter a question-like query, such as 'how to llimit api cost,' it transforms it into multiple queries, like 'budget' and 'limit.' in the self-hosted version, it use the CHAT_COMPLETION_MODEL env variable for selecting the llm model. in our cloud version, we use a fine-tuned version of 4o-mini that we will eventually move to a smaller model like llama8b or even 1b.
- pjot 2y agoGot it! I saw this in the code and assumed you were using embeddings def evaluate(input: shared.EvaluationInput): ds = Dataset.from_list(input.dataset) metrics = [metric_map[metric] for metric in input.metrics] llm = ChatOpenAI( model_name=shared.LANGUAGE_MODEL, base_url=os.environ["OPENAI_API_BASE"], api_key=os.environ["OPENAI_API_KEY"], ) embeddings = OpenAIEmbeddings( model=shared.EMBEDDING_MODEL, base_url=os.environ["OPENAI_API_BASE"], api_key=os.environ["OPENAI_API_KEY"], )
- yujonglee 2y agothat piece of code is for llm response evaluation, but we are not really using it at the moment.
- alexbouchard 2y agoBeen looking for something like this! Doc search just hasn't kept up with what's possible now and is such a hassle to get the indexing to work properly. Will try it out!
- yujonglee 2y agoplease let me know how it goes! we have Discord link in the top navbar: https://getcanary.dev/ https://getcanary.dev/
- dclowd9901 2y agoIgnorant question: how difficult would it be to integrate this with docusaurus?
- yujonglee 2y agoIt is not that difficult :) If you want pagefind-based local search: Doc: https://getcanary.dev/docs/local/integrations/docusaurus https://getcanary.dev/docs/local/integrations/docusaurus Example PR: https://github.com/microsoft/fast/pull/7031/files https://github.com/microsoft/fast/pull/7031/files If you want hosted-search: Doc: https://getcanary.dev/docs/cloud/integrations/docusaurus https://getcanary.dev/docs/cloud/integrations/docusaurus Example PR: https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm/pull/6160/files https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm/pull/6160/files