With more than a year of experience with Nextcloud, let me introduce you to Full Next Search, a replacement for Nextant.
The Core, the Basics and the Plugins
Like nextant, fullnextsearch allows you to index and search the content of your cloud.
The Core app (Full Next Search) won’t do anything by itself, some plug-ins are necessary:
- A gateway to a Search Platform. It is a plugin that will communicate to a search platform (like Elastic Search, Solr, …). right now, only one app is doing this: FullNextSearch_ElasticSearch
- Some Content Provider. Those plugins will browse and index a specific type of content. As of today, only your files can be indexed with an app: Files_FullNextSearch
link to the Store:
- https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/fullnextsearch
- https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/fullnextsearch_elasticsearch
- https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/files_fullnextsearch
What fullnextsearch is doing right now:
- create an index of your local files (text and PDF).
- integrate search bar in the files app.
- display search result (as of today, only on complete word) in the files app.
What basic functionality of nextant fullnextsearch is not doing right now:
- updating your index: if a file (or its share) is changed, the index will not be updated. (You cannot even re-index without reset the old index)
What fullnextsearch will do in the future that nextant is already doing.
Everything but the word completion on search.
What fullnextsearch will do that nextant does not (or will do better).
The top feature is that anyone can add a plug-ins to fullnextsearch to index more documents, so any app developper will be able to integrate the content generated in his/her app and display any search results.
But rewriting the code from scratch helped making a lot of improvements:
- Indexing will be [a lot] lighter,
- Integration to the cloud UI will be smoother.
There is also some ‘local’ feature that was requested on nextant and that are already available on files_fullnextsearch like the ability to search within a specific folder.
Should I install fullnextsearch ?
First, fullnextsearch is currently in ALPHA with limited feature and should NOT be installed in a production environment.
Then a lot of feature from nextant are not yet available on fullnextsearch. If your current setup of nextant is stable enough, I won’t blame you if you want to wait for a more advanced version of fullnextsearch 
If you still want to have a look to fullnextsearch, keep in mind that you should not run nextant and fullnextsearch at the same time.
However, if you have issues with nextant when indexing your files please give a try to fullnextsearch: the current status of fullnextsearch is enough to test the indexing. In fact, you are the perfect proof of concept !
