PostgreSQL Full-Text Search for Video Metadata

Why Full-Text Search Matters for Video Platforms When you have tens of thousands of video records with titles in multiple languages, LIKE queries stop being viable. At DailyWatch , we aggregate trending videos from 8 regions — US, UK, Germany, France, India, Brazil, Australia, Canada — and users expect instant, relevant search across all of them. PostgreSQL's built-in full-text search (FTS) gave us exactly what we needed without bolting on Elasticsearch. Setting Up tsvector Columns The core idea is converting text into a searchable tsvector — a sorted list of normalized lexemes. Rather than computing this on every query, we store it as a column: ALTER TABLE videos ADD COLUMN search_vector tsvector ; UPDATE videos SET search_vector = setweight ( to_tsvector ( 'english' , coalesce ( title , '' )), 'A' ) || setweight ( to_tsvector ( 'english' , coalesce ( channel_title , '' )), 'B' ) || setweight ( to_tsvector ( 'english' , coalesce ( description , '' )), 'C' ); Weight A is the highest pr