Hi trevandcal,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
Are you running Mojave? If so there's a few issues with the Help we are still looking into. I'm sorry for the inconvenience. Meanwhile you can use the online help as an alternative (assuming you have internet access available).
Well usually you don't need server farms in order to index a finite number of HTML text pages in an appropriate way here. Instead it's more a matter of the used help systems and it's used algorithms for indexing and of course to be diligent yourself when include additional tags and metadata for accurate indexing purposes.
Apple - Indexing Your Help Book
Google also does it automatically and algorithmic. Further think about having a bad bandwidth or no internet at all under certain situations, of what help is Google then?
Siri can you hear me? - Oh damn no internet connection ...
