Static site search for Astro in 2026: why I picked Pagefind over Algolia and Lunr

I added search to all three of my AI-curated directory sites last month. The choice wasn't obvious — there are at least four options with real adoption — so here's the breakdown I actually ran through before landing on Pagefind . The four options I considered Pagefind is a Rust-based static search library. It runs at build time, generates an index in /_pagefind/ , and serves everything as static files. No backend, no API key, no per-query billing. It ships a prebuilt UI ( PagefindUI ) that you c