How Does Full-Text Search Work in a CMS?
IntermediateQuick Answer
TL;DR
Full-text search in a CMS indexes the complete text of documents—body copy, headings, metadata, and structured fields—so users can find content by searching any word or phrase, not just titles or tags. The CMS (or an integrated search service) builds an inverted index: a map from every word to the documents containing it. When a query arrives, the engine looks up matching documents, scores them by relevance, and returns ranked results.
Key Takeaways
- Full-text search indexes all text content, not just titles or tags, enabling search by any word or phrase
- Tokenization breaks text into searchable units; stemming matches word variants like "running" and "run"
- Relevance ranking uses algorithms like TF-IDF or BM25 to score and order results
- Field weighting lets you boost matches in titles over body text for more useful results
- Multilingual search requires language-specific analyzers to handle stemming and stop words correctly