PostgreSQL Full Text Search: A Complete Guide

There's a database already running in your stack. It has your users, your content, your transactions. And buried in that same PostgreSQL instance is a full text search engine you've probably never turned on. PostgreSQL full text search has been production ready for over a decade. It handles stemming, stop words, multiple languages, weighted ranking, and trigram fuzzy matching. You don't need Elasticsearch for a search feature. You don't need Algolia if your data is already in Postgres. For most applications, especially those with under a few million documents, built-in full text search is the right call. This guide covers everything you need to ship full text search in PostgreSQL: how the underlying model works, how to index correctly, how to rank results, and how it compares to vector search with pgvector. How PostgreSQL Full Text Search Works PostgreSQL doesn't search raw text. It converts text into a normalized representation called a tsvector , then matches queries expressed as tsq