The one thing that does both me quite a bit with a static site.
I use Hugo and come from a WordPress background.
In WP the search feature is there from the beginning and you do not
have to do much for it to work. You can do a lot to make search better.
You can also install the Jetpack for a more advanced search.
I know this is possible today with certain external services that all seem be quite complicated or have other issues.
At work (not releated to WP) We use AWS Elasticsearch quite a bit and
for some older projects we have PostgresSQL using full text search.
So I could create a system using either of those as well.
I would much prefer to have a checkbox on deploy or on configuration that
just says “include search” and everything else magically happens in the
background. Re indexing could be triggered by new deploy
Super good.
I would not mind paying more for it. Package as an add in like analytics.
I am sure there are very good reasons for not doing it yet, or perhaps
it is already there and I dont know about it, which will make me feel
stupid but happy when I learn how to use it.
I am not so keen on having to setup my won Lambda functiions and what not to configure my own search engine.