textsuch

Textsuch is a term used in German-speaking computing to denote the process and capability of searching textual content within a corpus or repository. In English contexts, the concept is usually called text search or full-text search. Textsuch can apply to locating occurrences of words, phrases, or patterns across documents, emails, code bases, or databases, and may involve both simple keyword matching and more advanced linguistic processing.

Core components include indexing, where an inverted index maps terms to their locations in documents; tokenization, normalization and stemming or lemmatization; stopword removal; and a ranking function to order results by relevance, often using BM25 or TF-IDF. Query support commonly includes boolean operators, phrase and proximity searches, wildcard and regular expressions; some systems also provide fuzzy matching and natural-language querying. Textsuch interfaces may be exposed via SQL, NoSQL, or dedicated search APIs.

Historically, Textsuch evolved from early Boolean information retrieval systems to modern full-text search engines. It is foundational in search engines, digital libraries, content management systems, and enterprise search solutions. In German-language documentation, Textsuch or Volltextsuche distinguishes text search from structured data search or metadata queries.

Prominent implementations include open-source engines such as Apache Lucene, Elasticsearch and Solr, as well as database-backed features like PostgreSQL's full-text search. The field continues to evolve with advances in natural language processing, semantic search, and contextual ranking, expanding to multilingual search capabilities across diverse corpora.