full-text search

Full-text search is a technique for searching within documents or databases for occurrences of a specific word or phrase. Unlike simple searches that might only look at metadata or specific fields, a full-text search engine examines all the words in the actual content of the documents. This involves indexing the text to enable fast and efficient searching. The process typically includes stemming (reducing words to their root form), removing stop words (common words like ‘the’ and ‘a’), and creating an inverted index that maps words to their locations within the documents. This allows users to quickly retrieve relevant documents based on their content, even if the search terms appear anywhere within the text.