Understanding full-text search - FTS

If you are looking up names or for simple strings, you are usually querying the entire content of a field. In FTS, this is different. The purpose of full-text search is to look for words or groups of words, which can be found inside a text. Therefore, FTS is more of a contains operation as you are basically never looking for an exact string.

In PostgreSQL, FTS can be done using GIN indexes. The idea is to dissect a text, extract valuable lexemes, and index those elements rather than the underlying text. To make your search even more successful, those words are preprocessed.

Here is an example:

test=# SELECT to_tsvector('english', 'A car, I want a car. I would not even mind having many cars'); 
                          to_tsvector                           
--------------------------------------------------------------- 
 'car':2,6,14 'even':10 'mani':13 'mind':11 'want':4 'would':8 
(1 row)

The example shows a simple sentence. The to_tsvector function will...