# What changed in zbsearch

> 26 changes in zbsearch 3 to 4 from its official release notes, upgrade guides and advisories: 1 breaking, 13 new APIs and options. Each one cited. Sources checked 2026-10-19. HTML: https://unstale.sh/npm/zbsearch/

To see which of these apply to a repository, run `npx @unstale/cli init` in it.

## zbsearch 4

### Breaking changes

- Splitting keeps letters from other scripts and trims punctuation at token edges. (4.0.1) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.1)

### New APIs and options

- Engine primitives needed by a lazily-loaded static index are exposed. (4.0.1) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.1)
- A sharded, lazily-fetched index is added for static sites. (4.0.1) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.1)
- Adds the chunkedLoad method. (4.0.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.0)
- A Docusaurus plugin is now available. (4.0.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.0)
- IndexedDB persistence is now supported. (4.0.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.0)
- Adds the insertMultipleAsync method for asynchronous multiple inserts. (4.0.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.0)
- Adds the loadAsync method. (4.0.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.0)
- S3 persistence is now supported. (4.0.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.0)
- Instances can now be created without a schema. (4.0.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.0)
- Slovak language support is now available. (4.0.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.0)
- Suggestions APIs are now available. (4.0.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.0)
- A Vitepress integration is now available. (4.0.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.0)

### Performance

- The docs-index payload is trimmed and hydrated off the main thread. (4.0.1) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.1)
- Document insertion reuses the tokenizer normalization cache. (4.0.1) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.1)

### Behavior and default changes

- The English stopword list now includes “a”. (4.0.1) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.1)
- Repeated tokens are kept by default so BM25 sees term frequencies. (4.0.1) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.1)
- The sharded index is shipped through docs-index and every framework plugin. (4.0.1) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.1)
- The markdown parser for docs integrations has been improved. (4.0.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.0)
- Search quality has been improved. (4.0.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.0)

### Fixes and other changes

- Fixes the English stemmer. (4.0.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.0)
- Fixes handling of accented searches in PluginPT15. (4.0.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v4.0.0)

## zbsearch 3

### New APIs and options

- Adds support for zero-config multilingual instances. (3.3.4) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v3.3.4)

### Fixes and other changes

- Fixes hybrid search scoring and weight handling. (3.3.4) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v3.3.4)
- Repairs insertMultiple semantics. (3.3.4) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v3.3.4)
- Repairs removeMultiple semantics. (3.3.4) — [release notes](https://github.com/micheleriva/zbsearch/releases/tag/v3.3.4)