Note: I do agree that improving odoc benefits everyone in the OCaml community and is therefore a worthy goal. But I don't think we can reasonably expect the people who contribute to the OCaml reference manual to do this work, because those people are few and far between -- the manual sees maybe a human-week of work every year.

Fair enough! Just a thought. How hard do you think it'd be to add search to the manual?

@sanette had implemented search in his own custom overlay over the stdlib API documentation (see discussion thread from 2019), so it is probably doable to do this for the reference manual as well -- indexing the text after HTML rendering, I suppose.

(I'm not sure I would decide to invest time in this myself, given that the manual is already indexed by search engines, for example the Google search site:ocaml.org/manual inline records seems to work just fine. Is providing a local, custom search engine over the manual text something that would really make a difference for users?)

Yes, I think it would make a difference. Being able to search for items in the docs while reading is quite helpful. And not every user may know about Google's site: feature

For indexing the part of the manual which is not the API, I think https://pagefind.app/ could help. I've add good results deploying it on top of an existing documentation in which the search was pretty poor. And it's really simple to setup, from a practical standpoint.