Text indexes for search in MongoDB

Introduction

Text indexes help you quickly find documents containing specific words or phrases in your database.

You want to search for products by name or description in an online store.

You need to find articles containing certain keywords in a blog database.

You want users to search messages or comments by text content.

You want to filter documents by matching words in multiple fields.

Syntax

MongoDB

db.collection.createIndex({ fieldName: "text" })

You create a text index on one or more fields to enable text search.

Only one text index is allowed per collection, but it can cover multiple fields.

Examples

Create a text index on the 'title' field to search book titles.

MongoDB

db.books.createIndex({ title: "text" })

Create a text index on both 'title' and 'content' fields to search in both.

MongoDB

db.articles.createIndex({ title: "text", content: "text" })

Create a text index on 'description' to search product descriptions.

MongoDB

db.products.createIndex({ description: "text" })

Sample Program

This example inserts three movie documents, creates a text index on 'title' and 'description', then searches for movies containing the word 'space'.

MongoDB

db.movies.insertMany([
  { title: "Star Wars", description: "A space adventure" },
  { title: "Star Trek", description: "Exploring the galaxy" },
  { title: "The Martian", description: "Survival on Mars" }
])
db.movies.createIndex({ title: "text", description: "text" })
db.movies.find({ $text: { $search: "space" } })

Important Notes

Text search is case-insensitive and ignores common words like 'the' or 'and'.

You can use $text with $search to find documents matching words or phrases.

Text indexes support language-specific rules for better search results.

Summary

Text indexes let you search text inside fields quickly.

Create text indexes on one or more fields but only one per collection.

Use $text and $search to find documents matching your search words.