Re: full text searching

"Mitch Vincent" <mitch@venux.net> writes:

> > I've been using a variant of the FTI system in an application, but this is
> > far from sufficient when it comes to matching. Speed is OK, but the
> quality
> > of the results could have been a lot better.
>
> Really? How are you using it? If it's better than the one I wrote (and it
> almost has to be!) I'd love to take a look.. Speed is OK on the machine I'm

It is really not based on the FTI code in PostgreSQL, since with we started
out with a Progress database last year before porting to PostgreSQL. The
idea is the same though, a separate lookup table containing the words for
exact matching. Last time I had a look at the clients database it had about
50-60K rows in the content table, which amounted to about ~3500K rows in
the lookup table. Searches return results instantly even though most of
them are joins involving 3-4 tables. The database(7.0.2) is running on a
Sun 220R with one 450MHZ processor, 10000RPM disks, 1GB RAM and Solaris
7. (As a curiosity my P466 laptop with Linux is actually running PostgreSQL
faster...)

Since we're only doing exact searches, the index is utilized. But the
quality isn't good enough - I would love to have language sensitive
searches. "car" should match "cars" but not cartography and "ship"
should/could match "boat" etc.

Regards,

    Gunnar