Re: [HACKERS] phrase search

> I have attached a patch for phrase search with respect to the cvs head.
> Basically it takes a a phrase (text) and a TSVector. It checks if the
> relative positions of lexeme in the phrase are same as in their
> positions in TSVector.

Ideally, phrase search should be implemented as new operator in tsquery, say #
with optional distance. So, tsquery 'foo #2 bar' means: find all texts where
'bar' is place no far than two word from 'foo'. The complexity is about complex
boolean expressions ( 'foo #1 ( bar1 & bar2 )' ) and about several languages as
norwegian or german. German language has combining words, like a footboolbar -
and they have several variants of splitting, so result of to_tsquery('foo #
footboolbar') will be a 'foo # ( ( football & bar ) | ( foot & ball & bar ) )'
where variants are connected with OR operation.

Of course, phrase search should be able to use indexes.
>
> If the configuration for text search is "simple", then this will produce
> exact phrase search. Otherwise the stopwords in a phrase will be ignored
> and the words in a phrase will only be matched with the stemmed lexeme.

Your solution can't be used as is, because user should use tsquery too to use an
index:

column @@ to_tsquery('phrase search') AND is_phrase_present('phrase search',
column)

First clause will be used for index scan and it will fast search a candidates.

> For my application I am using this as a separate shared object. I do not
> know how to expose this function from the core. Can someone explain how
> to do this?

Look at contrib/ directory in pgsql's source code - make a contrib module from
your patch. As an example, look at adminpack module - it's rather simple.

Comments of your code:
1)
+#ifdef PG_MODULE_MAGIC
+PG_MODULE_MAGIC;
+