🔗 Postgres as a search engine

Build a hybrid search engine with semantic, full-text, and fuzzy search - all within Postgres

Search is hard. It's a critical part of many apps, but getting it right isn't easy. This is especially true for RAG-pipelines where the quality of retrieval can make or break the entire process.

While semantic search is trendy, good old lexical search is still the backbone. Semantic techniques can improve results, but they work best when added to a solid text-based search foundation.

In this post, we'll explore how to use Postgres to create a robust search engine. We'll combine three techniques:

• Full-text search with tsvector
• Semantic search with pgvector
• Fuzzy matching with pg_trgm

This approach might not be the absolute best for every situation, but it's a great alternative to setting up a separate search service. It's a solid starting point that you can implement and scale within your existing Postgres database.

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