Full Text Search best weight options? General question.

• lewisdow123 90045

  SSC-Addicted

  Points: 404

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  February 21, 2017 at 1:05 pm

  #335475

  Hi,

  I am building a full text search and would like to answer a general question on the best way to handle a user's input.

  In this scenario the user is searching a website for vacant job positions in the database.  Therefore the user may search terms like "sales manager" or "sales executive" into a single text input element on a webpage.... much like http://www.monster.co.uk etc

  My question is what method would an existing job board use to search their content?

  Would it be "Sales AND Manager" / "Sales AND Executive" -- which could be too general
  Or
  "Sales OR Manager" / "Sales OR Executive" -- which could be not tight enough like the above
  Or
  "Sales NEAR Manager" / "Sales NEAR Executive"
  Or
  "Sales+Manager" / "Sales+Executive"  -- which would be very restrictive.

  Or do they do cleverer stuff with customised weights like the first answer in the following link?
  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13700320/sql-server-isabout-weighted-terms 

  I am a bit confused on how I should tackle this task.

  How would you go about this problem?

  Thanks

• Steve Jones - SSC Editor

  SSC Guru

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  February 22, 2017 at 9:12 am

  #1929757

  While you could do this, I'd really go forward with something like ElasticSearch or Lucerne, which are better than SQL FTS.

  https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch