Full text search

Search without another system

PostgreSQL parses text into normalised lexemes, so a search for one word form matches the others and stop words are dropped. For a great many applications that is enough, and one fewer system to operate is a real feature.

Store the search vector in a generated column and index it. Computing it per query means a full table scan and a lot of parsing on every search.

Relevance ranking weights matches by field and frequency, so a match in a title can outrank one buried in a body.