What Is Full-Text Search? Inverted Indexes, Relevance and Where Elasticsearch Fits
Full-text search splits text into words ahead of time and keeps, in an inverted index, the documents each word appears in; unlike LIKE '%…%' it does not scan the table, handles suffixes and case through an analyzer and ranks results with BM25. With real output: LIKE's Index Scan over 200 thousand rows, a toy C# inverted index whose BM25 score matches Elasticsearch's _explain, the standard analyzer's Turkish gaps, shards, replicas and licensing.
14 Nov 2026
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15 min
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12
