Perform a Text Search (Self-Managed Deployments)
Note
This page describes text query capabilities for self-managed (non-Atlas) deployments. For data hosted on MongoDB Atlas, MongoDB offers an improved full-text query solution, Atlas Search.
To run text search queries on self-managed deployments, you must have a text index on your collection. MongoDB provides text indexes to support text search queries on string content. Text indexes can include any field whose value is a string or an array of string elements. A collection can only have one text search index, but that index can cover multiple fields.
See the Text Indexes on Self-Managed Deployments section for a full reference on text indexes, including behavior, tokenization, and properties.
Examples
This example demonstrates how to build a text index and use it to find coffee shops, given only text fields.
Create a Collection
Create a collection stores
with the following documents:
db.stores.insertMany( [ { _id: 1, name: "Java Hut", description: "Coffee and cakes" }, { _id: 2, name: "Burger Buns", description: "Gourmet hamburgers" }, { _id: 3, name: "Coffee Shop", description: "Just coffee" }, { _id: 4, name: "Clothes Clothes Clothes", description: "Discount clothing" }, { _id: 5, name: "Java Shopping", description: "Indonesian goods" } ] )
Create a Text Index
Run the following in mongosh
to allow text search over
the name
and description
fields:
db.stores.createIndex( { name: "text", description: "text" } )
Search for an Exact Phrase
You can also search for exact phrases by wrapping them in double-quotes.
If the $search
string includes a phrase and individual terms, text
search will only match documents that include the phrase.
For example, the following will find all documents containing "coffee shop":
db.stores.find( { $text: { $search: "\"coffee shop\"" } } )
For more information, see Phrases.
Exclude a Term
To exclude a word, you can prepend a "-
" character. For example, to
find all stores containing "java" or "shop" but not "coffee", use the
following:
db.stores.find( { $text: { $search: "java shop -coffee" } } )
Sort the Results
MongoDB returns its results in unsorted order by default. However,
$text
queries compute a relevance score for each document
that specifies how well a document matches the query.
To sort the results in order of relevance score, you must explicitly
project the $meta
textScore
field and sort on it:
db.stores.find( { $text: { $search: "java coffee shop" } }, { score: { $meta: "textScore" } } ).sort( { score: { $meta: "textScore" } } )
$text
is also available in the aggregation pipeline.