# 8.11. Text Search Types
PostgreSQL provides two data types that are designed to support full text search, which is the activity of searching through a collection of natural-language documents to locate those that best match a query. The tsvector
type represents a document in a form optimized for text search; the tsquery
type similarly represents a text query. Chapter 12 provides a detailed explanation of this facility, and Section 9.13 summarizes the related functions and operators.
# 8.11.1. tsvector
A tsvector
value is a sorted list of distinct lexemes, which are words that have been normalized to merge different variants of the same word (see Chapter 12 for details). Sorting and duplicate-elimination are done automatically during input, as shown in this example:
SELECT 'a fat cat sat on a mat and ate a fat rat'::tsvector;
tsvector
### 8.11.2. `tsquery`
[]()
A `tsquery` value stores lexemes that are to be searched for, and can combine them using the Boolean operators `&` (AND), `|` (OR), and `!` (NOT), as well as the phrase search operator `<->` (FOLLOWED BY). There is also a variant `<*`N`*>` of the FOLLOWED BY operator, where *`N`* is an integer constant that specifies the distance between the two lexemes being searched for. `<->` is equivalent to `<1>`.
Parentheses can be used to enforce grouping of these operators. In the absence of parentheses, `!` (NOT) binds most tightly, `<->` (FOLLOWED BY) next most tightly, then `&` (AND), with `|` (OR) binding the least tightly.
Here are some examples:
SELECT 'fat & rat'::tsquery; tsquery