Implementing Search: PostgreSQL Full-Text vs Algolia vs Meilisearch

Search Is Harder Than It Looks LIKE '%query%' works until: Your table has 100k rows (Seq Scan, slow) Users misspell words (no fuzzy matching) Users search in different languages Users expect relevance ranking Then you need a real search solution. Option 1: PostgreSQL Full-Text Search Good enough for most apps. No extra infrastructure. -- Add a tsvector column for fast search ALTER TABLE posts ADD COLUMN search_vector tsvector ; -- Populate it UPDATE posts SET search_vector = to_tsvector ( 'english' , coalesce ( title , '' ) || ' ' || coalesce ( content , '' ) || ' ' || coalesce ( tags :: text , '' ) ); -- Keep it updated automatically CREATE FUNCTION update_search_vector () RETURNS trigger AS $$ BEGIN NEW . search_vector : = to_tsvector ( 'english' , coalesce ( NEW . title , '' ) || ' ' || coalesce ( NEW . content , '' ) ); RETURN NEW ; END ; $$ LANGUAGE plpgsql ; CREATE TRIGGER posts_search_vector_update BEFORE INSERT OR UPDATE ON posts FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE FUNCTION update_search_vect