Re:Show HN: I wrote a full text search engine in Go
by novocayn on Thursday October 09, 2025 @10:32PM
(#45534933)
You're right, string-based queries are very expressive. I intentionally avoided that here so readers could focus on how FTS indexes work internally. Adding a full query system would have shifted the focus away from the internals.
If you notice there are vv obvious optimizations we could make. I’m planning to collect them and put a these as code challenges for readers, and building string-based queries would make a great one :)
Could you explain more why you avoided parsing strings to build queries? Strings as queries are pretty standard for search engines. Yes, strings require you to write an interpreter/parser, but the power in many search engines comes from being able to create a query language to handle really complicated and specific queries.