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10.1.2 Basic Text Matching

Full text searching in PostgreSQL is based on the match operator @@, which returns true if a tsvector (document) matches a tsquery (query). It doesn't matter which data type is written first:

SELECT 'a fat cat sat on a mat and ate a fat rat'::tsvector
 @@ 'cat & rat'::tsquery;
 ?column?
----------
 t

SELECT 'fat & cow'::tsquery @@ 'a fat cat sat on a mat and
 ate a fat rat'::tsvector;
 ?column?
----------
 f

As the above example suggests, a tsquery is not just raw text, any more than a tsvector is. A tsquery contains search terms, which must be already-normalized lexemes, and may combine multiple terms using AND, OR, and NOT operators. (For details see section 6.11 Text Search Types.) There are functions to_tsquery and plainto_tsquery that are helpful in converting user-written text into a proper tsquery, for example by normalizing words appearing in the text. Similarly, to_tsvector is used to parse and normalize a document string. So in practice a text search match would look more like this:

SELECT to_tsvector('fat cats ate fat rats') @@
 to_tsquery('fat & rat');
 ?column?
----------
 t

Observe that this match would not succeed if written as

SELECT 'fat cats ate fat rats'::tsvector @@ to_tsquery('fat &
 rat');
 ?column?
----------
 f

since here no normalization of the word rats will occur. The elements of a tsvector are lexemes, which are assumed already normalized, so rats does not match rat.

The @@ operator also supports text input, allowing explicit conversion of a text string to tsvector or tsquery to be skipped in simple cases. The variants available are:

tsvector @@ tsquery
tsquery  @@ tsvector
text @@ tsquery
text @@ text

The first two of these we saw already. The form text @@ tsquery is equivalent to to_tsvector(x) @@ y. The form text @@ text is equivalent to to_tsvector(x) @@ plainto_tsquery(y).