31. January 2015
Basic Concepts of a Search Index
Introduction
A text index is a way to store information about textual data to improve ease of retrieval. The basic idea is to store the information in such a way that it is possible to retrieve what you are looking for without doing a full scan of the data. A text index will do this by storing information about each indexed word separately. So where in the raw text you might have a text field with the contents “this is a description”, a full text index would store information about each individual word separately, so it would store a form of “this”, “is”, “a”, and “description”.