Site search: Advantages of text search engines

• Combine searchable data into a universal index

• No SQL: Web-standard searching operators

  • can use +plus (required), - minus (excluded) and quotes (phrase)

  • Boolean AND, OR, NOT and parentheses

• Query parsing flexibility

  • keywords, not necessarily in order

  • stemming

  • spellcheckers

  • synonyms

  • other extensions, fuzzy matching, phonetic matching

• Tends to improve query speed

• Search results relevance ranking

  • Sort by most-likely good matches

  • Mainly use TF-IDF

  • Extra weight for matches as phrases

  • Extra weight for matches in titles, other special fields

• Flexible formatting of results pages

• Distribute search load to other app, other server, or several other servers

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for more information, see SearchTools.com