Short answers

@weber-development/cosine-answers reads the top results of a search, picks the sentence that best answers the question and shows it with a link to the page. It runs in the browser, needs no account or API key and gives the same answer every time.

npm i @weber-development/cosine-answers

Add it to the search element

<cosine-search id="search" index="/cosine/cosine-index.json"></cosine-search>
<div id="answer" hidden></div>

<script type="module">
  import "@sweberdev/cosine/element";
  import { attachAnswer } from "@weber-development/cosine-answers";

  attachAnswer(document.getElementById("search"), document.getElementById("answer"), {
    maxLength: 280,
    minConfidence: 0.5,
  });
</script>

attachAnswer returns a function that removes the listener again.

Use the functions directly

import { findAnswer, renderAnswer } from "@weber-development/cosine-answers";

const answer = findAnswer(query, results); // results from cosine.search(query)
if (answer) target.innerHTML = renderAnswer(answer);

findAnswer returns { text, url, title, heading, confidence, matched } or null. Options: maxLength (280), minConfidence (0.5) and labels: { readMore }.

When you get no answer

You get null when confidence is below minConfidence, when fewer than half of the question's words are covered, or when two different pages answer about equally well. Nothing is better than a wrong answer.

The answer is extractive: it quotes your docs and never rewrites them. If no page states the answer in one or two sentences, there is none. Only the top three results are read.

renderAnswer escapes all text and only links relative, http and https URLs. Style it with .cosine-answer, .cosine-answer-text and .cosine-answer-link.