[alexpeattie]

Ah ok, interesting :). We were weighing up exactly these kind of tradeoffs a few weeks ago, and the benchmarks we did put the 2 approaches more or less neck and neck, so maybe PG has managed to optimize things a bit? Or, our search is over hundreds of thousands of rows, so maybe things only slow down in the millions and above...

[YorickPeterse]

If I remember correctly the tables we ran full text search on didn't have millions of rows, and we used PostgreSQL's simple/basic language (whichever one of the two it was). We did also run a similarity filter (using the pg_trgm similarity() function), maybe we also had trigram indexes on top. I can't really remember.