Don't just return results — show users WHY they matched (highlighting in pure Python)
You searched for "python search", got 40 results, and each row shows... a title and nothing else. The user still has to open each one to find out which paragraph actually matched. Every good search UI solves this the same way: a short snippet around the match, with the query terms bolded . Google does it, GitHub does it, your docs site should too. You don't need Elasticsearch for that. Whoosh —…
The article discusses how to improve search results by highlighting the matched terms in the search output, using the Whoosh library in pure Python. By default, search results only show the title, but highlighting the matched terms can help users quickly identify the relevant documents. The article provides a step-by-step guide on how to use Whoosh to achieve this, including installing the library, creating an index schema, adding documents, and performing a search with term highlighting.
The author also mentions a potential gotcha related to highlighting fields and provides a code snippet to demonstrate the process.
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