Databases
Intermediate
What is Full-Text Search?
A technique for searching natural language text in databases using word stemming, ranking, and relevance scoring.
Full-text search goes beyond simple LIKE queries. It tokenizes text into words, applies stemming (running → run), removes stop words (the, is, at), and ranks results by relevance. PostgreSQL provides built-in tsvector/tsquery types.
Features include phrase search, proximity search, weighted columns, and fuzzy matching. PostgreSQL's GIN indexes accelerate full-text queries. For more advanced needs, dedicated search engines like Elasticsearch or Meilisearch offer additional features.
