Earlier this week, Tom MacWright posted Code Search is Hard. He describes the research he his doing to improve the code search experience of Val Town. It was a great read, and you might have seen it trending on Hacker News.
As Val Town's most active user (behind Steve Krouse, one of the founders of Val Town), I for sure agree with Tom that search feature of Val Town needs improvements. But while reading his post, I immediately thought of a different approach to the problem. And a few hours later, Val Town Search was born.
How does this new shiny search engine work? Well, it's quite simple.
- I wrote a Deno script that fetches all vals from the Val Town API.
- I pushed the data to a Github Repository
- I added a Github Action that runs the script every hour to refresh the data.
- I created a simple frontend on top of the Github Search API that allows you to search the data. It's hosted on Val Town (obviously).
That was it. I didn't have to build a complex search engine, I just used the tools that were available to me.
Is this a scalable solution for Val Town? Probably not.
Am I abusing the Github API? Maybe.
Does it work better than the current search feature of Val Town? Absolutely!
I hope that the val.town engineers will come up with a search feature that will put my little project to shame. But for now, you won't find a better way to search for vals than Val Town Search.