Sending a request to a database and displaying the output

I am trying to build a search engine. I am designing a front end for the engine and I want users to be able to search a term and the request be sent to a database, mongoDB, where some logic is carried out searching an index and an order of the results would be displayed. Is this at all possible in webflow, any methods that someone could inform me on to make this work, or is this too much?

The index is extremely large and the results may differ upon each search, so simply just storing all the static pages isnt an option.

You can’t query a database directly from the browser (unless you have a read only token that you can share on the web), you have to first create an api gateway, then fetch data, then recreate the html using js

As @pietrofalco says, you need a gateway in between. If you’re not into building APIs, you might check out nocodeapi, or xano. You could even build the functional endpoints as webhooks in Make.com. Sometimes I prototype APIs for webflow in pipedream since it has a clean programming model and UI.

How does generating a response work with using an API and webflow? A user enters a search term, hits search, how does a results page get served back to the user? Feel free to link me a resource if thats easier to explain. Thanks.

The gateway will gave you usually a json response with data, not a web page effectively. You will need to read the data and create the html accordingly