Postgres extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search
Last summer we faced a conundrum at my company, Tiger Data, a Postgres cloud vendor whose main business is in timeseries data. We were trying to grow our business towards emerging AI-centric workloads and wanted to provide a state-of-the-art hybrid search stack in Postgres. We'd already built pgvectorscale in house with the goal of scaling semantic search beyond pgvector's main memory limitations. We just needed a scalable ranked keyword search solution too. The problem: core Postgres doesn't provide this; the leading Postgres BM25 extension, ParadeDB, is guarded behind AGPL; developing our…
Postgres extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search launched on March 31, 2026 with 203 votes, #156 of 23,380 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches.
In plain words
This Postgres extension enables BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search within PostgreSQL databases. Built by Tiger Data, a Postgres cloud vendor, it allows developers to implement keyword search alongside semantic search capabilities for AI-centric workloads. The extension provides scalable ranked search functionality directly in Postgres without requiring separate search infrastructure, offering an alternative to existing solutions in the ecosystem.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
PostgreSQL extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search. Postgres OSS licensed. - timescale/pg_textsearch
In the maker’s words, at launch
Last summer we faced a conundrum at my company, Tiger Data, a Postgres cloud vendor whose main business is in timeseries data. We were trying to grow our business towards emerging AI-centric workloads and wanted to provide a state-of-the-art hybrid search stack in Postgres. We'd already built pgvectorscale in house…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- PTPg_textsearch – BM25 Ranking for PostgresOct 2025 · docs.tigerdata.com · ▲13
I built pg_textsearch, a Postgres extension that brings proper BM25 ranking to full-text search. It's designed for AI/RAG workloads where search quality directly impacts LLM output. Postgres native ts_rank lacks corpus-aware signals (no IDF, no TF saturation, no length normalization). This causes mediocre documents to rank above excellent matches, which matters when your LLM depends on retrieval quality. Quick example: CREATE EXTENSION pg_textsearch; CREATE INDEX articles_idx ON articles USING bm25(content); SELECT title, content to_bm25query('database performance', 'articles_idx') AS…
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Retake – Open-Source Hybrid Search for Postgres2023 · github.com · ▲88Hey HN! We're Phil and Ming, co-founders of Retake (https://github.com/getretake/retake). Retake is an open source tool that adds keyword and semantic (i.e hybrid) search to databases. We’ve started by extending the capabilities of Postgres with an SDK for lightning-fast queries. We built Retake to fix two issues: keeping vectors in sync with Postgres in real time is difficult, and most vector databases aren’t built for hybrid search. A quick refresher: “keyword search” refers to a technique where results are scored based on the appearance of exact words or terms.…
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