College Conductor gives educational consultants and counselors access to the information of thousands of U.S. colleges and universities. The most natural method to find these schools is through search. Since College Conductor keeps up with the latest versions of Django, I was able to add search by using PostgreSQL’s full text search that is exposed to the Django ORM. The search features are not perfect, but they provide results quickly and avoid bringing in a more targeted tool like Elasticsearch. This post will cover some of the advantages and disadvantages of using these Django features.

The search ability of College Conductor centers around searching for university names. That means that the data has a couple of interesting characteristics:

1. All search results will be on phrases like University of Virginia or Johns Hopkins University.
2. A large percentage of the terms are practically useless to search for (e.g., University, College).

When I reviewed the search options that Django exposes in PostgreSQL, I found two reasonable approaches: full text search and trigram similarity.

Let’s look at the one that I didn’t choose first.

Trigram similarity

Trigram similarity operates by chunking up data into three letter groups. Using some computation, PosgreSQL can compare the trigrams and attempt to deduce what the result should be. This technique is great for resolving typos (which is sometimes called “fuzzy matching”). For instance, if you’re searching for fruit and type appel, a trigram search would find the expected result of apple.

Unfortunately, I found that trigrams failed spectacularly for long phrases. I liked the idea of fuzzy matching so I started with the trigram option. When I tested out the functionality, it didn’t work at all. Not only would Vriginia fail to find University of Virginia, but searching for Virginia would also fail to find the school. I believe this failure occurred because so much of the school’s full name was missing. Who wants to type out Massachustets College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences to benefit from spelling Massachusetts incorrectly? Answer: no one.

Let’s try option two.

Full text search

Getting a reasonable solution working for full text search was tricky. Again, phrases proved to be troublesome. For any level of success, I had to break up a search query into its parts and join them together with an OR operator. By taking this approach, I could avoid the granularity problem that was unavoidable with the trigram version.

Here’s the code to build the queryset:

# `search` is the user's provided search string.
terms = [SearchQuery(term) for term in search.split()]
# `name` is where the name of the school is stored in the model.
vector = SearchVector('name')
query = functools.reduce(operator.or_, terms)
queryset = queryset.annotate(
    rank=SearchRank(vector, query)).order_by('-rank')
queryset = queryset.filter(rank__gte=0.04)

Using this join strategy with an OR operator had one additional snag. There was a level of junk results that would appear that had nothing to do with the search phrase.

The result include a rank annotation that measure of how good the match is for the query. Inspecting the rank showed that all the junk was below a numeric threshold. Because the list of U.S. schools changes extremely infrequently, I decided to cut off anything below the threshold (which happened to be close to 0.04). If the data set changed frequently, I wouldn’t trust this magic number; but I get to benefit from the unchanging nature of my data set.

There are still problems with this method of searching that I’m not crazy about:

1. Because trigrams are not part of the search, no results will appear unless a term is spelled correctly. That’s annoying.
2. A partial search is equally invalid. For example, a search for Virg will not find any results. Also annoying.

In the long term, I don’t think PostgreSQL full text search will remain for College Conductor. In the short term, however, it is a great choice for getting decent search functionality cheaply.