Can you explain bit more? Isn't the dump of last RARBG magnet links on the order of MBs? We can just download it and grep in plain text. I don't get what is the role of SQLite or IPFS here.
Disclaimer: I wrote that article and was somewhat involved in the other sqlite over ipfs project this is forked from.
Yes, for MB size files just downloading the whole thing will be faster and much easier - even if running in the browser. I'd say the boundary is somewhere around 10MB compressed (~20-200MB uncompressed). Looks like the sqlite dump used here is ~400MB in size, ~180MB compressed. Loading that in the browser would probably work but it wouldn't be too great.
