Laptops generally come in 128GB or 256GB capacities. So we're talking roughly 20-50% of an average laptop's storage just to hold the search index for wikipedia alone.
Meaning it is not feasible to store a useful index of the web today on a laptop unless you want to dedicate that laptop to pretty much exclusively searching wikipedia's english content.
You're not searching that database in milliseconds on average laptop hardware, either, but you probably could get it to be "fast enough" for practical usages if you could somehow solve the harder parts like storage size, freshness, and indexing more than just wikipedia's english content.
That’s also assuming Wikipedia is worth having an offline index for. Wikipedia, for Bonn controversial, general knowledge has its value, but something gets lost with 1000 chefs in the kitchen. The beauty of the internet is that it isn’t Encarta.
Laptops generally come in 128GB or 256GB capacities. So we're talking roughly 20-50% of an average laptop's storage just to hold the search index for wikipedia alone.
Meaning it is not feasible to store a useful index of the web today on a laptop unless you want to dedicate that laptop to pretty much exclusively searching wikipedia's english content.
You're not searching that database in milliseconds on average laptop hardware, either, but you probably could get it to be "fast enough" for practical usages if you could somehow solve the harder parts like storage size, freshness, and indexing more than just wikipedia's english content.