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

Study the full deck →