How do you do phrase-based full text search in postgres that takes advantage of the full-text index?

Question

Let\'s say you have a postgres 8.3 table as follows:

CREATE TABLE t1 (body text, body_vector tsvector);

I want to be able to search it for phras

Answer 1

If you want exact phrase matching, that's the way to do it. You can also try WHERE body_vector @@ plainto_tsquery('w1 w2'), and then order it by ranking. (the point being that the hits where the words are right next to each other should end up on top)

Answer 2

Update: PostgreSQL 9.6 text search supports phrases

select
  *
from (values
  ('i heart new york'),
  ('i hate york new')
) docs(body)
where
  to_tsvector(body) @@ phraseto_tsquery('new york')

(1 row retrieved)

or by distance between words:

-- a distance of exactly 2 "hops" between "quick" and "fox"
select
  *
from (values
  ('the quick brown fox'),
  ('quick brown cute fox')
) docs(body)
where
  to_tsvector(body) @@ to_tsquery('quick <2> fox') 

(1 row retrieved)