Really, front end JS frameworks don't make sense for an app like this (I would only use a JS framework if there was a significant amount of rich client interact

Really, front end JS frameworks don't make sense for an app like this (I would only use a JS framework if there was a significant amount of rich client interaction; in your case there is not, you're justing searching from a form). Rails or Django would be easiest, IMO, and they have a ton of libraries to make the search easy. You should absolutely not have to write any algorithms or anything... whatever you choose would probably just look like ExampleSearchLibrary.new(magazine_records).search(string_from_form) and that's it. I think the hardest part is getting all the magazine data in a DB, and designing the model layer in a way that makes sense. I'm assuming it's already digital, so it would be a matter of writing scripts to scrape & save.