<story><title>Postgres full text search is good enough</title><url>http://blog.lostpropertyhq.com/postgres-full-text-search-is-good-enough/#1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrweasel</author><text>One interesting thing we learn from build an online store: People uses search alot less that you would think.&lt;p&gt;We started to notice that customers will use the menu and filtering options, rather than searching for an item. Need something from the &amp;quot;electronics&amp;quot; category, click the electronics menu tab, and pick the subcategory. From there customers browse or filter until they find what they&amp;#x27;re looking for.&lt;p&gt;Of cause so do use the search, and most people would have better results if they did search directly.&lt;p&gt;My point is: Maybe we could have just used Postgresqls full text search in this case. The queries will be rather simply anyway. The new syntax won&amp;#x27;t matter much, you need to learn something new anyway if you use Solr or ElasticSearch. Search is fare less important than people think, it just needs to be there and be &amp;quot;good enough&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Yes, Sphinx is awesome, if you&amp;#x27;re doing plain searches, filtering can get complicated pretty quickly.</text></item><item><author>birken</author><text>Well the article is right in one sense: Postgres full text search is probably better than you think it would be and is very usable at non-massive scale&lt;p&gt;However, I still wouldn&amp;#x27;t recommend using it.  The queries and indexes are all unintuitive, complex, not very readable and require learning a bunch of new syntax anyways (as you can see in the examples in the blog post).  So just take the effort you would spend doing that and instead learn something with more features that will continue running no matter how large your scale.&lt;p&gt;While the blog mentions elasticsearch&amp;#x2F;solr (which are awesome and powerful), it doesn&amp;#x27;t mention sphinx (&lt;a href=&quot;http://sphinxsearch.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sphinxsearch.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;).  If I were trying to make a simple search engine for my postgres&amp;#x2F;mysql powered site, I&amp;#x27;d use sphinx.  The indexer can be fed directly with a postgres&amp;#x2F;mysql query, and it includes simple APIs for all languages to interface with the searcher daemon.  And of course it is super fast, has way more features and can scale larger than you&amp;#x27;d ever need (sphinx powers craiglist&amp;#x27;s search).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>orbifold</author><text>I think that is not so much because of the fact that people do not want to use search, just that by experience they&amp;#x27;ve learned that it is usually next to useless on most sites. At least that is my experience.</text></comment>
<story><title>Postgres full text search is good enough</title><url>http://blog.lostpropertyhq.com/postgres-full-text-search-is-good-enough/#1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrweasel</author><text>One interesting thing we learn from build an online store: People uses search alot less that you would think.&lt;p&gt;We started to notice that customers will use the menu and filtering options, rather than searching for an item. Need something from the &amp;quot;electronics&amp;quot; category, click the electronics menu tab, and pick the subcategory. From there customers browse or filter until they find what they&amp;#x27;re looking for.&lt;p&gt;Of cause so do use the search, and most people would have better results if they did search directly.&lt;p&gt;My point is: Maybe we could have just used Postgresqls full text search in this case. The queries will be rather simply anyway. The new syntax won&amp;#x27;t matter much, you need to learn something new anyway if you use Solr or ElasticSearch. Search is fare less important than people think, it just needs to be there and be &amp;quot;good enough&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Yes, Sphinx is awesome, if you&amp;#x27;re doing plain searches, filtering can get complicated pretty quickly.</text></item><item><author>birken</author><text>Well the article is right in one sense: Postgres full text search is probably better than you think it would be and is very usable at non-massive scale&lt;p&gt;However, I still wouldn&amp;#x27;t recommend using it.  The queries and indexes are all unintuitive, complex, not very readable and require learning a bunch of new syntax anyways (as you can see in the examples in the blog post).  So just take the effort you would spend doing that and instead learn something with more features that will continue running no matter how large your scale.&lt;p&gt;While the blog mentions elasticsearch&amp;#x2F;solr (which are awesome and powerful), it doesn&amp;#x27;t mention sphinx (&lt;a href=&quot;http://sphinxsearch.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sphinxsearch.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;).  If I were trying to make a simple search engine for my postgres&amp;#x2F;mysql powered site, I&amp;#x27;d use sphinx.  The indexer can be fed directly with a postgres&amp;#x2F;mysql query, and it includes simple APIs for all languages to interface with the searcher daemon.  And of course it is super fast, has way more features and can scale larger than you&amp;#x27;d ever need (sphinx powers craiglist&amp;#x27;s search).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aw3c2</author><text>As a user I never trust myself to know the &amp;quot;right&amp;quot; search terms nor the search box to show the &amp;quot;right&amp;quot; results. If I browse, I know that I see all the items and I can filter with exact, pre-defined (trusted) attributes.</text></comment>