5 Ways for Sorting Full-Text Search Results in MongoDB

Grow your skills with different methods

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MongoDB is the most popular NoSQL database today, it’s a document-oriented database used in many modern web applications. Searching in MongoDB can be done in many different ways, including traditional string searches, which are not as efficient as modern indexed searches, or full-text searches that provide more rich options for advanced querying. We will be using it to explore different ways to sort results.

Preparing Test Data and Text Index

If you have data to test with, then you can skip this step. If not, then open up your MongoDB shell and run the following commands:

Use a test database:

use testdb

Import the following sample movie dataset that contains three fields title, plot, and rating in a collection named movies by running this command:

To verify the insertion, you can run this command db.movies.find() and it should print out all the movies above.

Now all that’s left is to create an index for our new movies collection, we will create an index for both fields title and plot so we can search them both with one query. In the MongoDB shell, run the following command:

db.movies.createIndex({ "title": "text", "plot": "text" })

To verify that the index was created successfully run db.movies.getIndexes() and it should print out two indexes the default and our newly created one.

Now, let’s test our dataset and run a simple text search with our new index, let’s search for the movie Doctor Strange by running the following command:

db.movies.find({ $text: { $search: "doctor strange" } })

It should return the following result:

{ 
  "_id" : ObjectId("62ed3dac947748ca508e093e"),
  "plot" : "After his career is destroyed, a brilliant but arrogant and conceited…