In this article, we will what is a full-text search engine and how you can create one using expertrec full-text search engine.
What is a full-text search engine
Full-text search engines search for all the words in a document as opposed to other search engines that rely on searching metadata. To accomplish this, all the words in a given document are crawled, indexed, and searched. Full-text search engines are good at searching huge volumes of data for specific words. They have inbuilt capabilities like fuzzy query matching, search results ranking mechanisms, synonyms. Certain advanced full-text search engines, also have the ability to understand natural language understanding capabilities that can offer a personalized search experience. Most web search engines use full-text search techniques.
Features of a Full-Text search engine
- Autocomplete.
- Spell correct.
- Facets.
- Relevance ranking control.
- Sorting capabilities.
- Advanced Boolean search capabilities(OR), NOT, AND etc.
- Search results weighting.
- Stemming.
Fulltext search vs Keyword Search
Indexing:
keyword searches cannot take advantage of an index which helps in faster search response times. Due to this a non-full text search engine has to look at every single row for a keyword match.
Stemming:
A full-text search can stem words. If you search for run, you can get results for “ran” or “running”. Most full-text engines have stem dictionaries in a variety of languages.
Weighted Search Results:
A full-text search index allows for weighting search results to promote them or demote them in search results. This flexibility comes in handy for search administrators.
How to create a full-text search engine?
- Go to full-text search engine creator.
- Enter your website URL. if you have a feed, you can upload that as well in the eCommerce version of the search engine.
- Now the full-text search engine will start crawling and indexing your website.
- Once the crawling and indexing are complete, you will get a crawl complete message. Now you can copy-paste the code to your website and start using the full-text search engine.
Add a Full Text custom search results page
