Text Search Operators (Legacy)¶

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Query Framework
Aggregation Pipeline

MongoDB offers a full-text search solution, MongoDB Atlas Search, for data hosted on MongoDB Atlas. A legacy text search capability is available for users self-managing MongoDB deployments.

Note

Views do not support text search.

Query Framework¶

Use the $text query operator to perform text searches on a collection with a text index.

$text will tokenize the search string using whitespace and most punctuation as delimiters, and perform a logical OR of all such tokens in the search string.

For example, you could use the following query to find all stores containing any terms from the list “coffee”, “shop”, and “java” in the stores collection:

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db.stores.find( { $text: { $search: "java coffee shop" } } )

Use the $meta query operator to obtain and sort by the relevance score of each matching document. For example, to order a list of coffee shops in order of relevance, run the following:

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db.stores.find(
   { $text: { $search: "coffee shop cake" } },
   { score: { $meta: "textScore" } }
).sort( { score: { $meta: "textScore" } } )

For more information on the $text and $meta operators, including restrictions and behavior, see:

Aggregation Pipeline¶

When working with Aggregation Operations pipelines, use $match with a $text expression to execute a text search query. To sort the results in order of relevance score, use the $meta aggregation operator in the $sort stage [1].

For more information and examples of text search in Aggregation Operations pipelines, see Text Search in the Aggregation Pipeline.

For data hosted on MongoDB Atlas, Atlas Search provides the $search aggregation stage to perform full-text search on your collections.

[1]	The behavior and requirements of the `$meta` projection operator differ from that of the `$meta` aggregation operator. For details on the `$meta` aggregation operator, see the `$meta` aggregation operator reference page.

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