In an effort to improve their "developer experience" (DX) around using the Symfony framework the development team has introduced new searching functionality to help more effectively find what you're looking for in the expansive Symfony documentation.

Symfony boasts one of the largest documentation pools ever written for an Open- Source project. Considering the ten different Symfony versions (from 2.0 to master) and including the code samples, Symfony Documentation has around 3.6 million words, more than three times the word count of the entire Harry Potter series.

They share some of the things they learned around creating a search engine ("it's hard") and what they ultimately ended up using - the Algolia service. The post talks about how they indexed the current documentation and broke it up into "chunks" of meaningful content. They also include the simple Javascript they use that links the search field to the Algolia service and renders the results using a view partial.

The proof of concept for the new search engine was a success and we decided to stop the ElasticSearch integration and stick with Algolia. The new search engine is greatly faster than the previous one and the search results are more accurate and relevant.