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Brian Swank
Brian Swank

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at swank.dev

Implement Fuzzy Text Search with Mongoose

There are a bunch of great services that make search really simple, but adding simple fuzzy text search to a Mongoose model is a quick & easy win for when those services are overkill.

Prerequisites

You'll need a Node project up and running with Mongoose installed and at least one Mongoose model.

A Little Bit About Fuzzy Search

Fuzzy search is a standard in search implementations. Users expect it and we should deliver as advocates of our users. A simple text search needs to allow for a small typo, a missing space, and other errors.

Text search in MongoDB is fairly straight-forward. The $regex operator allows for partial-text search and the $text operator makes a full-text search possible, but enabling fuzzy search is a little more complicated.

Indexing & n-grams

In order to match something like "uzz" to "fuzzy" we need to break "fuzzy" up into smaller pieces and index it. mongoose-fuzzy-searching is a simple package that helps us index text fields on our documents with n-grams, allowing us to match smaller text samples to potential matches in our collections – aka fuzzy search.

Implementation

Let's get started by installing the necessary package: npm i mongoose-fuzzy-searching.

With our package installed, we can add it as a plugin to our schema:

import mongoose, { Schema } from 'mongoose'
import mongooseFuzzySearching from 'mongoose-fuzzy-searching'

const user = new Schema({
  firstName: String
})

user.plugin(mongooseFuzzySearching, { fields: ['firstName'] })

export default mongoose.model('User', user)
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Now that we have the plugin added, any new documents added to our User collection will have the appropriate text index! In order to use our newly-implemented plugin, all we need to do is call the fuzzySearch method on our collection instead of find:

import User from '../models/User'

const users = await User.fuzzySearch('query')
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Given an empty query, our fuzzySearch method will act just like a find call, returning all relavent results.

Further Reading

To learn more about how to use mongoose-fuzzy-searching with existing data, it's various options, or with more complex find() calls, check out the readme on NPM.


Need some help? Feel free to reach out.

Top comments (5)

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paras594 profile image
Paras πŸ§™β€β™‚οΈ

I found this article on swank dev site and I am glad that i found this article here tooo. Just wanted to say amazing post. keep it up sir !! you rock ; )

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imtemporaryhere profile image
ImTemporaryHere

im quite dissapointed cause i have string value in my document with - character, and if do any query with this one, it send empty array

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briansw profile image
Brian Swank

Send me a link to your repo and I'll take a look!

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jrafflenbeul profile image
jrafflenbeul • Edited

I also have problems, am working with Next.js and TypeScript (package doesn't provide types as well). Only get an empty array (no error). You can see the API route, where I try to use the fuzzy search in the image I appended. Help is much appreciated :)

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briansw profile image
Brian Swank

Feel free to send me a link to a reproducible example and I'll take a look!