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Ask HN: How can I add good search to my website?
Hi HN,
I'd like to add good search functionality to an e-commerce website running with PostgreSQL as its database.
I've heard of ElasticSearch, Solr, and PostgreSQL full text search but never dug much farther into the subject.
Which tool would you guys recommend (I'm looking mostly for ease of use and maintainability)? What are the best resources/tutorials to learn how to use these tools? Where/how do you host these search engines (the cheaper the better)?
Thanks!
- mattbgates 9y agoFor my private websites, which require membership and would not be accessible via search engines, I just use general SQL search queries with a combination of PHP (stristr) and the results return quickly and accurately. Just make sure you are searching case-insensitive. Just be sure to add content or tags to your e-commerce pages so you have something to pick up. For my public websites, I use DuckDuckGo ( https://duckduckgo.com/search_box https://duckduckgo.com/search_box ) which has done a great job in regards to indexing. I used to use Google search but a few times, my website was penalized, and Google kills your website in ALL searches. While I've since gotten those penalties removed, I hated that IF a penalty occurred, I had to worry about that, so in order to not deal with that anymore, I made the switch. DDG is very rarely going to ever penalize your website. I was in luck as well because Google announced they were disabling their search anyway, so I had already made the switch and had no worries.
- odonnellryan 9y agoI've used Postgres FTS successfully on many different projects. You need to do a bit of planning before implementing, but it's pretty easy and straight forward. Feel free to reach out to me: ryan@luma.im if you'd like to chat about it!