// the take
A Vue 3 frontend for sese-engine, a lightweight self-hosted search engine you run on your own server or against your own set of sites. This repo is UI only — the actual crawling and indexing lives in a separate backend repo (RimoChan/sese-engine) that you deploy and run yourself. Fits someone who wants a personal, site-scoped search box (e.g. searching only your own domains) rather than a general web search product.
Builds to static files with Vite, so hosting is trivial — there's a working GitHub Pages workflow and it drops straight into Netlify/Vercel too. It ships i18n (en/zh-CN), dark mode, and an OpenSearch XML file that lets users register it as a browser keyword search (type 'sese' + query in the address bar). There's an actual vitest suite covering components, Pinia stores, i18n, and the search-highlighting logic, which is more test coverage than most projects this size bother with. The API layer is isolated behind a single VITE_API_URL env var, so swapping backends doesn't mean touching UI code.
This UI does nothing on its own — it's a thin client for a separate, similarly small backend (RimoChan/sese-engine) that you have to deploy, index, and keep running yourself; adopting this means committing to maintaining two small repos, not one. It's pinned to Vite 2, several majors behind current Vite, so any dependency upgrade work starts with a migration rather than a bump. The settings page has an unfinished TODO (custom baseUrl isn't configurable at runtime), meaning real deployment flexibility is still incomplete. The README itself flags that HTTPS wasn't enabled by default and was only added after the maintainer was talked into it — not a great sign for how security defaults get treated elsewhere in the stack.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →