Can't override search with a 3rd party search?

[A-Baji]

I am trying to implement a 3rd party search since the native mkdocs-material search is not suitable for my project. I haven't chosen which search to use but right now I am testing with AddSearch. It crawls the provided domain and returns a key that is used here:
<script src="https://cdn.addsearch.com/v4/addsearch-ui.min.js?key=####"></script>

I'd hoped that it would be as simple as overriding the search using this script like so:

{% extends "base.html" %}

{% block config %}
  {{ super() }}
  <script>
    var __search = {
      worker: "https://cdn.addsearch.com/v4/addsearch-ui.min.js?key=####"
    }
  </script>
{% endblock %}

But doing this causes the search bar to disappear altogether. Am I doing something wrong? Or is what I want to do not possible?

[squidfunk]

The worker must point to a valid web worker. I'd suspect that you'd need to add the script as a separate search script, or somehow integrate querying their API into the web worker. Possibly not as easy as just including their script.

[UltraInstinct05]

since the native mkdocs-material search is not suitable for my project.

Maybe you could provide where exactly the default search fails for your use case ? Could be something that could be improved in mkdocs-material. The default search has been really solid for me, one of the best among various documentation systems I have tried out.

[A-Baji]

Maybe you could provide where exactly the default search fails for your use case ?

I am trying to create a documentation hub for various projects. One of the requirements for this is that all child documentation must include mike versioning. The thing about mike is that it was implemented to work specifically with gh-pages. The only workaround for this that I could figure out was to pull directly from each projects' gh-pages build into the parent docs directory, like this:

Then to access a child repo's docs, I just relatively link it in the parent index.md.

This all works perfectly. The only issue is that searching in the parent doc does not search any of the children docs, since the search index does not index the children. As I'm typing this, I'm realizing that a 3rd party search is probably not the best option. Would merging the child search indexes into the parent index while altering the locations accordingly work?

Perhaps this could be a feature of mkdocs-material? Where users can include in the config paths to search indexes that they want to be merged. Or is that too niche of a function?

[squidfunk]

Would merging the child search indexes into the parent index while altering the locations accordingly work?

That would be my recommendation. The search_index.json format is very straight forward, so you'd essentially only need to merge all nested search_index.json into one and prepend the path or URL to each entry. Probably 10-20 lines of code.

[squidfunk]

Perhaps this could be a feature of mkdocs-material? Where users can include in the config paths to search indexes that they want to be merged. Or is that too niche of a function?

It's rather niche. Also, this is a perfect use case for a third-party MkDocs plugin. It's probably already supported by one of the multi-project plugins.

[A-Baji]

It's probably already supported by one of the multi-project plugins.

I will look into this before trying to do it myself. Thanks for the help.