I've occasionally been tempted to struggle with postgres's full-text options... and always regretted it. It's idiosyncratic and quickly hits a ceiling, in terms

I've occasionally been tempted to struggle with postgres's full-text options... and always regretted it. It's idiosyncratic and quickly hits a ceiling, in terms of ranking-quality or query features, which is way below what's possible with specialized solutions. Even if you despise Java, SOLR or ElasticSearch aren't that hard to get up as a service. Each hour invested into getting those working is likely to return more value than an hour with PG's full-text search.