Full-text search indexes the complete text of documents, supporting term, phrase, proximity, and boolean queries. Effectiveness depends on text extraction quality and index completeness.
It differs from semantic search, which matches meaning rather than terms.
Alternative Names:
Text Search, Keyword Search
Why it Matters?
Search results are only as complete as the underlying index, and the failures are silent: documents whose text was not extracted return no results regardless of content. That is why scanned material and poor-quality faxes are effectively invisible to search unless OCR quality was verified. Understanding what a search did not cover is as important as the results it returned.
Frequently Confused with
Related terms
Frequently asked questions
What limits full-text search?
How does it differ from semantic search?
