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Setting up site search

DocsForge includes a powerful client-side search engine, powered by Marz. It's enabled by default via the search plugin. The backend emits a compact prebuilt index (.marz) alongside search_index.json, so the browser never builds the index itself — results are instant even for large sites, and Chinese/Japanese/Korean text is matched natively without a segmentation dictionary.

Configuration

Basic setup

Search is enabled by default:

plugins:
  - search

Search separator

Control how matched terms are highlighted in results:

plugins:
  - search:
      separator: '[\s\u200b\-_,:!=\[\]()"`\/]+|\.(?!\d)|&[lg]t;|(?!\b)(?=[A-Z][a-z])'

The separator only affects match highlighting in the UI. Indexing is done by Marz with per-language tokenization, so this never needs tuning for stemming or CJK text.

The default separator splits on:
- Whitespace and zero-width spaces
- Hyphens, underscores, commas, colons
- CamelCase boundaries (e.g., MyClass → My + Class)

Language

Configure search stemming for your language:

plugins:
  - search:
      lang: en

Multiple languages can be combined (lang: [en, ja]). Supported codes include ar, cs, da, de, el, en, es, et, fi, fr, hi, hu, id, it, ja, ko, nl, no, pl, pt, ro, ru, sv, ta, th, tr and zh — call marz.languages() for the full list. CJK text needs no extra setup: no jieba, no segmentation dictionaries.

Search features

Enable in theme.features:

Highlighting

Highlight matching terms in search results:

theme:
  features:
    - search.highlight

Suggestions

Show autocomplete suggestions as you type:

theme:
  features:
    - search.suggest

Allow users to share direct links to search results:

theme:
  features:
    - search.share

Complete search configuration

theme:
  features:
    - search.highlight
    - search.suggest
    - search.share

plugins:
  - search:
      separator: '[\s\u200b\-_,:!=\[\]()"`\/]+|\.(?!\d)|&[lg]t;|(?!\b)(?=[A-Z][a-z])'
      lang: en

Search behavior

  • Instant: Results appear as you type, with no server round-trip
  • Fuzzy matching: Minor typos are tolerated
  • Stemming: Searching for "run" finds "running", "runs", etc.
  • Ranking: Results ordered by relevance (title matches rank higher)
  • Excerpts: Each result shows a snippet with context

Excluding content from search

Add search.exclude front matter to hide a page:

---
search:
  exclude: true
---

Or exclude specific sections with HTML comments:

<!--search exclude-->
This content will not be indexed.
<!--end search exclude-->

Next steps