Search

Nikolay and Michael have a high-level discussion on all things search — touching on full-text search, semantic search, and faceted search. They discuss what comes in Postgres core, what is possible via extensions, and some thoughts on performance vs implementation complexity vs user experience.

 
Here are some links to things they mentioned:

• Simon Riggs https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7178702287740022784/
• Companion databases episode https://postgres.fm/episodes/companion-databases
• pgvector episode https://postgres.fm/episodes/pgvector
• Full Text Search https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/textsearch.html
• Semantic search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_search
• Faceted search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_search
• Faceting large result sets in PostgreSQL https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/faceting-large-result-sets/
• RUM index https://github.com/postgrespro/rum 
• Hybrid search (Supabase guide) https://supabase.com/docs/guides/ai/hybrid-search 
• Elastic https://www.elastic.co/ 
• GiST indexes https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/gist.html 
• GIN indexes https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/gin.html 
• btree_gist https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/btree-gist.html 
• btree_gin https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/btree-gin.html 
• pg_trgrm https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgtrgm.html 
• Text Search Types (tsvector and tsquery) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype-textsearch.html 
• Postgres full text search with the “websearch” syntax (blog post by Adam Johnson) https://adamj.eu/tech/2024/01/03/postgresql-full-text-search-websearch/
• Understanding Postgres GIN Indexes: The Good and the Bad (blog post by Lukas Fittl) https://pganalyze.com/blog/gin-index 
• ParadeDB https://www.paradedb.com/ 
• ZomboDB https://www.zombodb.com/ 
• Introduction to Information Retrieval (book by Manning, Raghavan, and Schütze) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Introduction-Information-Retrieval-Christopher-Manning/dp/0521865719 
• How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails (blog post by Justin Searls) https://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2021-09-09-how-to-build-a-search-engine-with-ruby-on-rails/

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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

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Postgres FM is brought to you by:

• Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai
• Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard

With special thanks to:

• Jessie Draws for the amazing artwork