A search box is easy. A searchable catalog that keeps being useful after the first query is the harder part. That is the problem this demo takes on. It uses a small board-game catalog, but the shape of the problem is familiar: users type something half-remembered, misspell it, narrow by constraints, keep browsing, open a result, then want "more like this" without starting over. If your product has that flow, most of the work is not the UI polish. It is getting the search behavior right without turning the stack into a science project. In this article, we build a searchable catalog with autocomplete, typo tolerance, filters, facets, deep pagination, semantic search, and similar-item recommendations. You can try the hosted version first: https://catalog.manticoresearch.com The app itself is implemented in PHP, but that is not really the story here.…