Full-Text Search: A Practical Guide for Node.js, TypeORM & PostgreSQL

Full-text search is a technique used to analyze strings, documents, or entire database columns to deliver flexible and intelligent search results. Instead of relying on string matching, full-text search looks at context, synonyms, and word variations.

So while a regular SQL query might match only "run", a full-text search can also match "running", "ran", or "runner" depending on the configuration.

Full-text search is supported by many databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and specialized engines like Elastic-search and Meilisearch.

In this article, we focus on PostgreSQL full-text search using TypeORM + Node.js.

Benefits of full-text search

1. Search Large Bodies of text quickly: If you have large text fields, like blog posts, recipes, product descriptions, or comments, full-text search lets you efficiently check which documents contain certain keywords.

   Example: Search for "chicken" → return all recipes that mention chicken anywhere in the text.

2. Better and more flexible search results: Full-text search handles imperfections in queries:

   • Typing "run shoes" can still match "running shoes"
   • Searching "comput" can match "computer" and "computing"

   This dramatically improves user experience on e-commerce, blogs, dashboards, and enterprise search tools.

When to use full-text search?

1. You want flexibility, not exact matches; Searching products, users, notes, events, or blog posts where partial matches are okay.
2. When you want to index large bodies of text and return results based on if a certain word or keyword is contained within that body of text ( returning a list of recipes that contain chicken).

Setting up full-text search in typeorm + postgres + nodejs

Below is an example using a simple Recipe entity that supports searching on both the name and description fields.

1. Create the Recipe Entity

@Entity() export class Recipe { @PrimaryGeneratedColumn() id: number; @Index({fulltext: true}) @Column("varchar") name: string; @Index({fulltext: true}) @Column("varchar") description: string; } 

1. Query the database using a the typeorm query-builder to return data based on the provided search query

async function searchRecipes(searchQuery: string) { return dataSource .getRepository(Recipe) .createQueryBuilder("recipe") .where(` to_tsvector('english', recipe.name || ' ' || recipe.description) @@ plainto_tsquery('english', :query) `) .setParameter("query", searchQuery) .getMany(); } 

In raw SQL this would look something like this

SELECT * FROM recipe WHERE to_tsvector(name || " " || description) @@ to_tsquery("Chicken"); 

This will then return all the recipes with chicken in it’s description or name