Search

Some letters are more equal than others

In the previous post, we looked at how full-text search works, treating all symbols in the index as equally important. But that’s not always how it works in practice — for instance, matches on whole words are usually better than matches on word fragments. This can be solved with weighting, which is today’s topic.

Fulltext search from scratch

Imagine, all of Shakespeare’s collected works hidden in a box of alphabet biscuits. That’s roughly the approach we’ll take as we build a tiny search engine in JavaScript to understand how full-text search works.