Re: full text searching

Lincoln Yeoh <lyeoh@pop.jaring.my> writes:

> Sometimes I want it literal too. e.g. I'm searching for car I want car and
> nothing else.

Of course, you want this as well. 

> In the end it seems too complex. I'm starting to think it may be better to
> keep things literal but fast, and do the smart stuff at the client (do
> multiple searches if necessary).

You got commercial products like Verity that is able to these kind of
things. I've used Verity in conjunction with Sybase, apart from stability
problems, that was a very nice combination on doing free text searches. I
could define which columns I wanted indexed, and then I could do you joins
against a proxy table(the index) to do synonym searches, word searches,
regex searches, soundex searches etc. 

Verity was running in a separate process and that Sybase forwards the free
text search to when you join against the proxy table. Maybe we could have a
similar architecture in PostgreSQL as well some day. 

Does anybody know how Oracle has implemented their "context" search or
whatever it is called nowadays ?

regards, 

	Gunnar