From: Mark Stosberg <mark@summersault.com>
Subject: Re: Writting a "search engine" for a pgsql DB
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2007 12:32:09 -0500
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 <45E31300.4070701@commandprompt.com>
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To: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org

Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> Madison Kelly wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>>   I am asking in this list because, at the end of the day, this is a
>> performance question.
>>
>>   I am looking at writing a search engine of sorts for my database. I
>> have only ever written very simple search engines before which amounted
>> to not much more that the query string being used with ILIKE on a pile
>> of columns. This was pretty rudimentary and didn't offer anything like
>> relevance sorting and such (I'd sort by result name, age or whatnot).
>>
>>   So I am hoping some of you guys and gals might be able to point me
>> towards some resources or offer some tips or gotcha's before I get
>> started on this. I'd really like to come up with a more intelligent
>> search engine that doesn't take two minutes to return results. :) I
>> know, in the end good indexes and underlying hardware will be important,
>> but a sane as possible query structure helps to start with.
> 
> See search.postgresql.org, you can download all source from
> gborg.postgresql.org.

Joshua,

What's the name of the project referred to? There's nothing named
"search" hosted on Gborg according to this project list:

http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/projdisplaylist.php

Madison,

For small data sets and simpler searches, the approach you have been
using can be appropriate. You may just want to use a small tool in a
regular programming language to help build the query. I wrote such a
tool for Perl:

http://search.cpan.org/~markstos/SQL-KeywordSearch-1.11/lib/SQL/KeywordSearch.pm

For large or complex searches, a more specialized search system may be
appropriate. I suspect that's kind of tool that Joshua is referencing.

  Mark