I’m experimenting with Algolia now; I’m quite impressed by features they offer in terms of how their search works (like dealing with typos), and I like the idea that they’re a company dedicated to search. And they quite a lot of funding, so they probably can keep innovating and improving.
Sadly, they don’t have a “Hugo plugin” or something so I’ll need to update my index by hand now (copy-paste a json file). Your (@rdwatters) write-up of how you use Lunr.js has been a big help for creating a json file, so thank you very much for that.
I’ve also experimented with Searchly, which has a free plan (5mb index) and offers a crawler (so in theory no need for json files), but had a technical issue for support, emailed them, and haven’t heard back from them in 5 days. So they’re not an option for me personally.