Should You Build Your Own Search Engine?

A parable of two pilots, two missions, and the crossroads every software engineer eventually faces.

chapter 1_

Mission Briefing

Search is what keeps users engaged, content discoverable, and apps usable. But “add search” is deceptively broad—it can mean anything from a basic keyword filter to a Google-grade engine of typo tolerance, natural language parsing, and relevance tuning.

In the orbiting shipyards of two similar startup galaxies, two developers receive an identical briefing from their product leads: “We need search.”

mission briefing_
> We need search
chapter 2_

Meet the Pilots

Pilot Nova

The Engineer's Engineer

Nova leads the engineering efforts for AstroMarket, a SaaS platform helping space merchants buy, sell, and barter gear in orbit. Her app is growing fast—too fast for the filters and hacks they’ve been using to surface content. She knows search is critical. She also believes in understanding things from first principles. So her instinct is immediate:

“I’ll build a search engine.”

Pilot Orion

The Pragmatist in Flight

Orion, meanwhile, is prepping for the launch of LunaDocs, a developer portal offering documentation and support for a suite of APIs. Orion’s users are impatient. They don’t browse, they search. His job? Make that experience instantaneous, intuitive, and precise. He fires up a browser tab and begins typing:

“how to create a search engine for a website”

chapter 3_

The Journey Begins

Nova Starts Building a Search Engine

Nova begins to build her own search engine. Her journey begins with ambition and excitement. She’s downloaded a few open-source search engine libraries and starts to piece together a plan. Her first sprint is simple enough—crawl the database, tokenize text, build an index. She’s proud. Her commits are beautiful. Her architecture is clean.

But within two weeks, friction begins.

  • Ranking logic is unreliable
  • Relevance tuning involves rebuilding the index again and again
  • Filters don’t chain cleanly

Orion Makes a Discovery

Back on LunaDocs, Orion is also moving fast. But his focus isn’t on designing a search engine—it’s on delivering a great user experience. When he finds Searchcraft, it immediately clicks: an SDK with drop-in components? Built-in typo tolerance, synonyms, and relevance tuning? Hosted or on-prem deployment? GUI dashboard for field weighting, stopwords, analytics? It’s perfect. He signs up.

Within a few hours, Orion has:

  • Created a search index and uploaded his docs
  • Tuned his schema using Vektron
  • Integrated live search into the frontend
chapter 4_

The Captain's Logs

Nova’s Log, Stardate 4.1.5

> Spent the last two days debugging the relevance scoring algorithm. Again.

> Queries for “space boots” are returning “bootstrapping startup resources” from old blog content.

> I might need to write my own boosting logic. Or maybe retrain the index.

> Search is working, but I’m starting to wonder… how do people make a search engine that actually works well?

Orion’s Log, Stardate 4.2.9

> Enabled time-decay ranking today in Searchcraft.

> Now newer docs surface higher by default, but older, well-matched content still ranks when it should.

> I didn’t even need to touch the backend.

> This is suspiciously easy.

> Tomorrow, I’m going to tune my field weightings and then I can start testing!

chapter 5_

The Outcomes

Nova finishes her engine. It works. It’s fast, when it doesn’t break. It’s hers, and she’s proud of that. But it cost her seven weeks of engineering time, two features delayed, and ongoing maintenance she didn’t budget for. Her users? They’re mostly happy. But they still occasionally email support with search bugs. And Nova’s roadmap? It’s starting to pile up.

Orion ships LunaDocs on time. Search just works. It’s fast, forgiving, and relevant. He spends his time improving docs, answering community questions, and building out features his users actually care about. His team never thinks about search again—except when they check analytics to see how well it’s performing.

Should You Build Your Own Search Engine?

In the orbiting shipyards of two similar startup galaxies, two developers receive an identical briefing from their product leads: “We need search.”

How do I make a search engine for my app?

Use a platform like Searchcraft to handle indexing, relevance, and UI integration without reinventing the wheel.

Can I build my own search engine?

Absolutely—but expect significant complexity, especially around relevance, performance, and scalability.

What’s the best way to add search to a web app?

Searchcraft provides drop-in SDKs, hosted infrastructure, and full control, making it the fastest and most flexible option.

Skip the Build,
Keep the Control

Advanced control over your search implementation is crucial—but it takes serious resources to build. Searchcraft gives your team instant access to all of it, with no need to reinvent search infrastructure.

Ready to build smarter?

Looking for an enterprise solution? Contact us.

Searchcraft only uses your personal information to administer your account and provide the products and services you requested. To stay up to date on the latest product enhancements and features, check the box below:

By clicking submit, you consent to allow Searchcraft to store and process the personal information above.

Thank you.
A Searchcraft crew member will be in touch soon.
Something went wrong. Please try that again.