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Postgres full-text search is good enough

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Re: Postgres full-text search is good enough

#41

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

justin_vanw wrote: post #13

As much as I would like it to be 'good enough', Postgres' full text search lacks the feature set to be a reasonable solution to most search use cases. Background: I wrote a product search engine for a company called iTrackr using Postgres full text search, and later wrote the product search for milo.com using Solr. I also designed a simple (but very effective) algorithm to boost search rankings based on historical us…

> You can turn stemming on and off, but you can't, for example, lowercase text, strip out html characters, handle special cases for tokenization (camel cased or delimited text, etc). You can write your own tokenizer, but it has to be as a C extension.

Of course this can be done without messing with C, you just massage your data on a trigger before updating the FTS index.

Re: Postgres full-text search is good enough

#42

Post by rachbelaid »

wuliwong wrote: post #40
rachbelaid wrote: post #32

As the author, it may be good that I clarify the goals behind this post. First I'm glad that this post made HN first page for a second time. I encourage to read this comment because it summarizes well few of the missing features in Postgres about search. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8715624 It's not the first time that I get similar feebacks and I understand that "Enough" is subjective notion and maybe I shou…

You just posted this today? This isn't the first time your article has been on the front page of HN. I actually still have your article "saved" in a tab in chrome from the last time it was on HN. It made quite an impression on me, I'm in the process of moving our dev environments from sqlite to postgres, so that we can start adding some of this functionality. Thanks.

To be honest, I'm quite surprise to see that somebody posted this article again.. I don't know HN rules when you can post again something.

I'm not going to complain about it :)

Re: Postgres full-text search is good enough

#43

Post by lucianmarin »

I’m using it on http://sublevel.net/ — there’s no problem whatsoever. It does the job so well, especially if you have consistent fields on tables. I like the fact that it can search multiple fields at once without degrading the performance. You can try it on Sublevel without creating an account.

Re: Postgres full-text search is good enough

#44

Post by angersock »

raquo wrote: post #14
olefoo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It points to a pathology of HN that someone discussing their experience with a specific technology is getting downvoted and flagged for describing their own experiences. This is not reddit, the downvote is not meant for enforcing groupthink. I'm in favor of Postgres, I make my living in large part from my expertise with it; but it rubs me the wrong way when people downvote an informative comment covering someone's ex…

I think it's more likely that no_future was shadow-banned for their previous comment.

Frankly, who gives a shit?

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

I'd much rather filter out the trolling from the useful experiences myself than have somebody shadowbanned because people disagreed with them.

Remember, downvotes signal disagreement, not civility. This is a problem.

Re: Postgres full-text search is good enough

#45

Post by why-el »

rachbelaid wrote: post #42
wuliwong wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just posted this today? This isn't the first time your article has been on the front page of HN. I actually still have your article "saved" in a tab in chrome from the last time it was on HN. It made quite an impression on me, I'm in the process of moving our dev environments from sqlite to postgres, so that we can start adding some of this functionality. Thanks.

To be honest, I'm quite surprise to see that somebody posted this article again.. I don't know HN rules when you can post again something. I'm not going to complain about it :)

I think you can repost about a year. It could have changed tough.

Re: Postgres full-text search is good enough

#46

Post by elehack »

I've been teaching databases this semester, and PostgreSQL's full-text search capabilities have been wonderful for allowing my students to build search into their projects without needing to learn additional tech (we're using PostgreSQL as our database anyway).

Re: Postgres full-text search is good enough

#47

Post by jessaustin »

philh wrote: post #23
mercurial wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't like about shadow-banning is that it's a death sentence without warning appeal for a single misstep. Drank a bit too much and typed a comment you're going to regret the next morning? Shadowban. At least, that's what it looks like from the history of the few shadowbanned people I looked at.

Counterexample: no_future has a lot of downvoted comments, and vis total karma is (slightly) negative. (I would guess that it was slightly positive until yesterday, and then ve received a lot of downvotes on a single comment and got autobanned.) This wasn't a single misstep, it was just the first one that attracted much attention.

Thanks, I hadn't seen those pronouns before.

Re: Postgres full-text search is good enough

#48

Post by crypto5 »

justin_vanw wrote: post #13

As much as I would like it to be 'good enough', Postgres' full text search lacks the feature set to be a reasonable solution to most search use cases. Background: I wrote a product search engine for a company called iTrackr using Postgres full text search, and later wrote the product search for milo.com using Solr. I also designed a simple (but very effective) algorithm to boost search rankings based on historical us…

> Postgres has no facility to make it possible to do faceting (histograms). This is a pretty big deal breaker for most kinds of eCommerce. I've seen a few attempts at this, but they are incredibly complex and slow compared to other search engines.

why exactly GROUP BY doesn't work here?

Re: Postgres full-text search is good enough

#49

Post by the_watcher »

rachbelaid wrote: post #32

As the author, it may be good that I clarify the goals behind this post. First I'm glad that this post made HN first page for a second time. I encourage to read this comment because it summarizes well few of the missing features in Postgres about search. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8715624 It's not the first time that I get similar feebacks and I understand that "Enough" is subjective notion and maybe I shou…

Interesting post. I work at Swiftype, where we build full-text search engines, and it's been interesting seeing the varying definitions of "good enough." It seems like Postgres full-text search is surprisingly decent for a less robust solution than something designed entirely for search, and I can see it being "good enough" if you are in the very early stages of development and don't want to add anything that requires additional knowledge to your project quite yet.

>> You want to give quickly a search feature (maybe not perfect) in the hand of your user

If this is your goal, rather than simply keeping your project contained to postgres as much as possible, Swiftype would be a better solution. Building a whole full-text search engine in a day with Postgres is faster than you could reasonably do with ES or Solr, but if your goal is simply the functionality, you can get a search engine into your app in less than an hour with Swiftype. We're built on Elasticsearch and Lucene, so you can get all their power from a team that works on it full time.

https://swiftype.com/

Re: Postgres full-text search is good enough

#50

Post by jaddison »

rachbelaid wrote: post #32

As the author, it may be good that I clarify the goals behind this post. First I'm glad that this post made HN first page for a second time. I encourage to read this comment because it summarizes well few of the missing features in Postgres about search. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8715624 It's not the first time that I get similar feebacks and I understand that "Enough" is subjective notion and maybe I shou…

Speaking of syncing strategies, I use Django with PostgreSQL as the main datastore and Elasticsearch as a secondary data store. PostgreSQL receives all admin and staff related updates and Elasticsearch is updated automatically using signals (and celery tasks if necessary).

I created a Django app to help with this syncing - check it out at https://github.com/jaddison/django-simple-elasticsearch. I love feedback and pull requests!

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