
Ask HN: How can I add good search to my website? - oliv__
Hi HN,<p>I&#x27;d like to add good search functionality to an e-commerce website running with PostgreSQL as its database.<p>I&#x27;ve heard of ElasticSearch, Solr, and PostgreSQL full text search but never dug much farther into the subject.<p>Which tool would you guys recommend (I&#x27;m looking mostly for ease of use and maintainability)? What are the best resources&#x2F;tutorials to learn how to use these tools? Where&#x2F;how do you host these search engines (the cheaper the better)?<p>Thanks!
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odonnellryan
I've used Postgres FTS successfully on many different projects. You need to do
a bit of planning before implementing, but it's pretty easy and straight
forward.

Feel free to reach out to me: ryan@luma.im if you'd like to chat about it!

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mattbgates
For my private websites, which require membership and would not be accessible
via search engines, I just use general SQL search queries with a combination
of PHP (stristr) and the results return quickly and accurately. Just make sure
you are searching case-insensitive. Just be sure to add content or tags to
your e-commerce pages so you have something to pick up.

For my public websites, I use DuckDuckGo (
[https://duckduckgo.com/search_box](https://duckduckgo.com/search_box) ) which
has done a great job in regards to indexing. I used to use Google search but a
few times, my website was penalized, and Google kills your website in ALL
searches. While I've since gotten those penalties removed, I hated that IF a
penalty occurred, I had to worry about that, so in order to not deal with that
anymore, I made the switch. DDG is very rarely going to ever penalize your
website. I was in luck as well because Google announced they were disabling
their search anyway, so I had already made the switch and had no worries.

