# PostgreSQL full-text search

5 Hacker News commenters recommended PostgreSQL full-text search and 7 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Built into PostgreSQL at no extra cost, people recommend it for many search needs; the common caveat is that it lacks corpus-wide ranking like BM25.

## Why people recommend it

- Built into Postgres, long-established (2 comments): "just use postrgres full text search" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48669274)) "postgres has had FTS for decades" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49772962))

## What people warn about

- No corpus-wide ranking like BM25 (4 comments): "it's missing an important feature: ranking based on the overall document collection" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49770114)) "which works well but doesn't have whole-index ranking algorithms" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47592690)) "The built in search can't do any scoring mechanism that involves corpus-wide stats" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49768502))
- Not enough for serious search (2 comments): "It is wild to see people talk about Postgres fulltext like it’s all you could need, even for small apps." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49383569)) "you wouldn't want to use Postgres FTS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49932822))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Elasticsearch](https://hackerapproved.com/p/elasticsearch.md): 68 recommend
- [Antfly](https://hackerapproved.com/p/antfly.md): 15 recommend
- [Scry](https://hackerapproved.com/p/scry.md): 11 recommend
- [Typesense](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typesense.md): 8 recommend
- [Manticore Search](https://hackerapproved.com/p/manticore-search.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "PostgreSQL full-text search", https://hackerapproved.com/p/postgresql-full-text-search/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).