For the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), public-key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) is a type of applicable and promising encryption technique to maintain the data stored in clouds secure and searchable. To further improve the efficiency of searching, it is popular to introduce edge computing near the IIoT as the substitute for a cloud. However, the straightforward collaboration of the two techniques performs negatively in latency-sensitive applications since the sluggish encryption of PEKS by IIoT devices negates the instant reaction of edges. To meet this challenge, in this article, we exploit the capability