A comparison of Postgres full text search with other search engines
published on 2022/10/15
Postgres is one of the best F/OSS databases partly because of its immense feature-set.
One of my favorite Postgres features is Full Text Search (FTS). Search is a common requirement of applications. Well-known search engines like Solr and ElasticSearch are often a first choice, but with Postgres in your stack you've got a great chance for Pareto improvement at low complexity cost.
Many projects function just fine with Postgres Full Text Search and other built-in extensions like trigram search (pg_trgm). GitLab's blog has a great article on their use of Trigram indices to speed up search.
Worth reading in full. The article compares it with the following search engines.
- MeiliSearch
- OpenSearch
- SQLite FTS
- Typesense