Search#

Kiln generates a search index (search/search_index.json) per language at build time. The bundled theme includes a small, dependency-free client that fetches the index and ranks results in the browser.

• No external service — nothing to host or pay for, and it works offline.

• No build-time JavaScript toolchain — the index is produced by Kiln itself.

• Per-language — each language searches only its own content; the default language’s content is indexed for pages that fall back.

Unicode & CJK#

Tokenisation is Unicode-aware:

• accented Latin scripts are matched whole (so a search without accents still finds accented words),

• Han/kana — which aren’t space-separated — are segmented into bigrams, so CJK queries work.

How fallback affects search#

Because untranslated pages fall back to the default language (see Content & Localisation), a language’s search index covers every page in the navigation — translated pages use their own text, and fallback pages use the default-language text. Readers always get complete results.

Search features#

Two opt-in theme features refine the experience:

theme: .default(features: [.searchSuggest, .searchHighlight])