Thanks the suggestion. I played with Metabase a bit today. It is great for custom dashboards, searchable query links etc. but, I could not find a interface element that would let me "full text search" a column in Postgres table..
You can use custom queries in metabase and parameterize them, for any parameter you can expose the parameter with a text field available when you embed the "question" anywhere.
The link was very helpful to learn about making use of FTS in Postgres. Thanks!
I still could not figure out how to expose a filter as a user modifiable dynamic search box/text field with Metabase. I could not find such a facility in their documentation, nor in their forums. I'm giving up on Metabase for this need.
we also use pgweb linked elsewhere here for engineers.
btw, we built a sql statement to spreadsheet + charts interface. DM if interested. intuitively - i think others may find it useful.