Comment by atrettel
4 days ago
This is pretty interesting.
Could you explain more why you avoided parsing strings to build queries? Strings as queries are pretty standard for search engines. Yes, strings require you to write an interpreter/parser, but the power in many search engines comes from being able to create a query language to handle really complicated and specific queries.
You're right, string-based queries are very expressive. I intentionally avoided that here so readers could focus on how FTS indexes work internally. Adding a full query system would have shifted the focus away from the internals.
If you notice there are vv obvious optimizations we could make. I’m planning to collect them and put a these as code challenges for readers, and building string-based queries would make a great one :)