search ~shard ~dynamic_sort {query; packages; limit} returns (pretty_query, results) where pretty_query is a re-printed version of query and results is the list of results corresponding to the query and the various parameters.

• shards is a list of databases. results is the union of the results of each database of the list shards. If shards is a very long list, api might be slow to return, but in some cases you do not have a choice. Currently, index generates only one shard, but it used to generate many to be able to handle the sheer size of the opam repository.

• ~dynamic_sort changes the order of results. It is true by default, and is only set to false for debugging purposes.

• query is the query string whose shape is a list of space-separated words, followed by an optionnal : ... type annotation that filters the results by type. The type annotation accepts _ as a wildcard : : string -> _ will return entries that take a string as argument, but returns anything.

• limit is the maximum length of results. Having a very large number might be an issue.

• packages is not function, use [] for this argument.