Backend Mystery · Card #16
How do you implement full-text search in a database?
You can use the native full-text search functionality of a database, such as MySQL, Postgre or even ElasticSearch.
However, if you want to implement it yourself, the steps would be:
- Preprocessing the text data to be searched and normalizing it by applying tokenization, stemming and removing stop words.
- Then, implement an inverted index, somehow relating each unique word to the records that contain that word.
- Create a search UI and normalize the input from the user in the same way the text data was normalized.
- Then, search for each word in the database.
- Sort the results by implementing a scoring logic based on different aspects, such as word frequency.
databases performance