Documentation Search, and What IndexNow Actually Does

2026-04-26 2026-09-11 274
L
Levlix Engineering
Documentation Search, and What IndexNow Actually Does

Search Without the Popup

The documentation search used to open a modal over the page. It now sits in the sidebar, where the rest of the navigation is, so finding a command no longer covers what you were reading.

How the Search Behaves

Worth knowing if you use it often:

  • It starts matching at two characters. Shorter queries return nothing rather than everything.
  • It searches the page name and the full page text, so slowmode finds the moderation guide even though the word appears nowhere in its headings.
  • It returns up to ten results, each with a snippet showing the text around your match, so you can tell the right page from the near-miss before clicking.
  • Draft pages are excluded. If a guide is not published yet, search will not surface it.

What IndexNow Does, and What It Does Not

Levlix pings the IndexNow protocol whenever documentation or blog pages change. It is worth being exact about what that buys, because the protocol is often described more broadly than it works.

IndexNow notifies Bing and Yandex. It does not notify Google, which does not participate in the protocol. Google discovers changes through its own crawl schedule and the sitemap, on its own timing.

So the honest version: pages you read here reach Bing and Yandex quickly after they change, and reach Google when Google decides to come back. We would rather say that than promise a speed we do not control.

If you want to see the machine-readable side of this, llms.txt lists the site for language models, and llms-full.txt carries the complete documentation text in one file.

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