How to replace built-in search with my custom search?

[syeda-git]

Hello,
Is it possible to replace the built-in search with our custom search? If yes, can you share the instructions?

Syed

[kamilkrzyskow]

Hello @syeda-git,
yes, it's definitely possible, as you have full control over the templates, and you can override each of them and set different contents.
There was a temporary POC set up with a chat bot inside the search a while ago #6240 but it has been later removed.

There are a lot of ways you can go about it, like different search index creation or just different front end data lookup.

Over in the upstream discussion board there was a suggestion to make a guide for adding Algolia search. You could track the development of the discussion there:

• Documentation search alternatives? mkdocs/mkdocs#3974

Here in the material theme you have the search.html template which contains the search component, and it's part of the header.html template partial.
https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material/blob/master/src/templates/partials/search.html

You could change the dialog and input another dialog box, together with some extra JavaScript to handle it.
https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/customization/#additional-javascript