How to Build a Serverless Search Engine with SimpleWorker and IndexTank

Our friends over at IndexTank recently posted an article on how to create a search page using IndexTank and SimpleWorker. SimpleWorker to gather data from a remote service, in this case Plixi, and IndexTank to index that data for searching. SimpleWorker is great for collecting and keeping data up to date because you can schedule a worker to run every X minutes to retrieve data and update your IndexTank index.

But even more interesting in this example is the fact that the search page is static html and runs without an application or server! You can create a search page with live up to date data without running a server anywhere. You could put this page on a cheap GoDaddy hosting account, Amazon S3, a file on your Intranet, or even on your local file system. Interesting stuff.

Try it out here

Check out the source code for this demo on GitHub.

This really got me thinking about what other things you could build without an application server and hopefully it will get your creative juices flowing too. Feel free to share any ideas in the comments below, we'd love to hear them.