Yeah that's $350 vs $35 - just to run text search?

I don't think determining factor is price, it is how easy or hands off the appliance can be.

Every postgres search implementation has atleast one internet connected postgres nerd on standby.

> I don't think determining factor is price

This is a solution that is supposed to be affordable in third-world countries, where 99% of all personal computing happens on low-to-mid-end smartphones.

Unless you specifically mean first-world countries, in which case you can just run a hotspot from your PC or laptop.

> it is how easy or hands off the appliance can be.

I can already barely justify having a single RasPi plugged into my router, and I'm a devops nerd. That box does one single thing that is too annoying to set up on my Mac mini. 99% of people do not want yet another blackbox appliance, this is why every single SOHO router has a built-in switch and AP.

> Every postgres search implementation has atleast one internet connected postgres nerd on standby.

It doesn't have to be postgres specifically, just pointing out that decent FTS has been commodity software for decades. Throwing LMs at every already-solved problem is the problem with LMs.

It's not a solved problem for people that aren't technically capable, and do not have internet access.

It's why Kiwix was developed, so people don't have to run a full web stack (which requires a rdbms) for wikipedia.

I don't know if LM is the answer and probably not in power deprived areas, but running a rdbms is defintely isn't it.

> running a rdbms

I agree with you on every step and every point except the LM. Your entire argument hinges on FTS requiring a fat RDBMS. This is not the case.

Postgres is what I have experience with, but I just looked up SQLite and indeed it has FTS5[1]. This is not an LM-grade problem, this is a solved problem.

[1]: https://www.sqlite.org/fts5.html

Why did you bring up postgres then?