Customize search result summary

[jtatum]

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Description

I know there are changes to search result summaries coming with #2976, but I'm wondering what I can do now to change the search result summary. Is there a way to override the function that generates or returns these, or some front matter I can use to set a static summary?

Use Cases

The data we have in mkdocs is highly structured, and the summaries are very low quality, with most failing to even show the page title.

Screenshots / Mockups

No response

[squidfunk]

Converting to discussion, since this is essentially a question.

[squidfunk]

Currently, the search result text is just truncated. You could either customize the truncate function:

mkdocs-material/src/assets/javascripts/utilities/string/index.ts

Lines 27 to 47 in f23f738

	/**
	* Truncate a string after the given number of characters
	*
	* This is not a very reasonable approach, since the summaries kind of suck.
	* It would be better to create something more intelligent, highlighting the
	* search occurrences and making a better summary out of it, but this note was
	* written three years ago, so who knows if we'll ever fix it.
	*
	* @param value - Value to be truncated
	* @param n - Number of characters
	*
	* @returns Truncated value
	*/
	export function truncate(value: string, n: number): string {
	let i = n
	if (value.length > i) {
	while (value[i] !== " " && --i > 0) { /* keep eating */ }
	return `${value.substring(0, i)}...`
	}
	return value
	}

... or alter the search result rendering function:

mkdocs-material/src/assets/javascripts/templates/search/index.tsx

Lines 89 to 91 in f23f738

	<p class="md-search-result__teaser">
	{truncate(document.text, 320)}
	</p>

On a side note, the new search should be ready shortly. Search summaries are really hard to get right for all languages (not just for space-separated, sentence-based ones). I've wanted to improve search summaries for a long, long time, but only had the idea how to do it quite recently. If you really can't wait, you can fork the theme and change the behavior of the sections I linked above 😊