Perform a search using facets

This page describes how to use facets for a full-text search. As part of interactive filtering, a facet is a potential filter value, and the count of matches for that filter. On websites with this capability, when you enter a search phrase, you get a list of results in the navigation menu, and there's a list of facets that you can use to narrow the search results, along with the number of results that fit into each category.

For example, if you use the query "foo" to search for albums, you might get hundreds of results. If there's a facet of genres, you could select by genres like "rock (250)," "r&b (50)," or "pop (150)".

In Spanner full-text search, you can use standard SQL expressions and full-text search functions for both filtering and filtered counting. You don't need to use special syntax to use facets.

Add facets to use for full-text searches

The following example creates a table for albums and tokenizes the title for each album. This table is used for examples on this page.

GoogleSQL 

CREATE TABLE Albums (
  AlbumId INT64 NOT NULL,
  Title STRING(MAX),
  Rating INT64,
  Genres ARRAY<STRING(MAX)>,
  Likes INT64 NOT NULL,
  Title_Tokens TOKENLIST AS (TOKENIZE_FULLTEXT(Title)) HIDDEN,
) PRIMARY KEY(AlbumId);

PostgreSQL 

CREATE TABLE albums (
  albumid bigint NOT NULL,
  title text,
  rating bigint,
  genres text[],
  likes bigint NOT NULL,
  title_tokens spanner.TOKENLIST GENERATED ALWAYS AS (spanner.TOKENIZE_FULLTEXT(Title)) VIRTUAL HIDDEN,
PRIMARY KEY(albumid));

Create a search index on Title_Tokens. Optionally, you can store Title, Genres and Rating in the search index to avoid a backjoin to the base table while computing facets.

GoogleSQL 

CREATE SEARCH INDEX AlbumsIndex
ON Albums (Title_Tokens)
STORING (Title, Genres, Rating)
ORDER BY Likes DESC;

PostgreSQL 

CREATE SEARCH INDEX albumsindex
ON albums (title_tokens)
INCLUDE (title, genres, rating)
ORDER BY likes DESC

For this example, insert the following data into the table.

GoogleSQL 

INSERT INTO Albums (AlbumId, Title, Rating, Genres, Likes) VALUES
(1, "The Foo Strike Again", 5, ["Rock", "Alternative"], 600),
(2, "Who are the Who?", 5, ["Progressive", "Indie"], 200),
(3, "No Foo For You", 4, ["Metal", "Alternative"], 50)

PostgreSQL 

INSERT INTO albums (albumid, title, rating, genres, likes) VALUES
(1, 'The Foo Strike Again', 5,'{"Rock", "Alternative"}', 600),
(2, 'Who are the Who?', 5,'{"Progressive", "Indie"}', 200),
(3, 'No Foo For You', 4,'{"Metal", "Alternative"}', 50)

Retrieve count values for a single facet

This example shows how to perform a facet count on a Rating facet. It performs a text search for "foo" within the Title_Tokens column of the Albums table.

GoogleSQL 

SELECT Rating, COUNT(*) AS result_count
FROM Albums
WHERE SEARCH(Title_Tokens, "foo")
GROUP BY Rating
ORDER BY Rating DESC

| Rating | result_count |
|--------|--------------|
| 5      | 1            |
| 4      | 1            |

PostgreSQL 

SELECT rating, COUNT(*) AS result_count
FROM albums
WHERE spanner.SEARCH(title_tokens, 'foo')
GROUP BY rating
ORDER BY rating DESC;

| rating | result_count |
|--------|--------------|
| 5      | 1            |
| 4      | 1            |

Retrieve count values for multiple facets

This example shows the steps for performing facet counting on multiple facets. It performs the following:

  1. Retrieve the initial search results: it performs a text search for "foo" within the Title_Tokens column of the Albums table.
  2. Calculate facet counts: it then computes counts for the Rating and Genres facets.

GoogleSQL 

WITH search_results AS (
  SELECT AlbumId, Title, Genres, Rating, Likes
  FROM Albums
  WHERE SEARCH(Title_Tokens, "foo")
  ORDER BY Likes DESC, AlbumId
  LIMIT 10000
)

SELECT
-- Result set #1: First page of search results
ARRAY(
  SELECT AS STRUCT *
  FROM search_results
  ORDER BY Likes DESC, AlbumId
  LIMIT 50
) as result_page,
-- Result set #2: Number of results by rating
ARRAY(
  SELECT AS STRUCT Rating, COUNT(*) as result_count
  FROM search_results
  GROUP BY Rating
  ORDER BY result_count DESC, Rating DESC
) as rating_counts,
-- Result set #3: Number of results for top 5 genres
ARRAY(
  SELECT AS STRUCT genre, COUNT(*) as result_count
  FROM search_results
  JOIN UNNEST(Genres) genre
  GROUP BY genre
  ORDER BY result_count DESC, genre
  LIMIT 5
) as genres_counts

PostgreSQL 

WITH search_results AS (
  SELECT albumid, title, genres, rating, likes
  FROM albums
  WHERE spanner.SEARCH(title_tokens, 'foo')
  ORDER BY likes DESC, albumid
  LIMIT 10000
)

-- The pattern ARRAY(SELECT TO_JSONB ...) enables returning multiple nested
-- result sets in the same query.
SELECT
  -- Result set #1: First page of search results
  ARRAY(
  SELECT JSONB_BUILD_OBJECT(
    'albumid', albumid,
    'title', title,
    'genres', genres,
    'rating', rating,
    'likes', likes
    )
  FROM search_results
  ORDER BY likes DESC, albumid
  LIMIT 50
) as result_page,
-- Result set #2: Number of results by rating
ARRAY(
  SELECT JSONB_BUILD_OBJECT(
    'rating', rating,
    'result_count', COUNT(*)
    )
  FROM search_results
  GROUP BY rating
  ORDER BY COUNT(*) DESC, rating DESC
) as rating_counts,
-- Result set #3: Number of results for top 5 genres
ARRAY(
  SELECT JSONB_BUILD_OBJECT(
    'genre', genre,
    'result_count', COUNT(*)
    )
  FROM
    search_results,
    UNNEST(genres) AS genre
  GROUP BY genre
  ORDER BY COUNT(*) DESC, genre
  LIMIT 5
) as genres_counts

Specifically, this example does the following:

  • WITH search_results AS (...) gathers a large set of initial search results to use for the first page of results and facet calculations.
  • SEARCH(Title_Tokens, "foo") is the primary search query.
  • LIMIT 10000 limits the cost of the search by reducing the result set to 10,000. For very broad searches that might return millions of results, calculating exact facet counts on the entire dataset can be expensive. By limiting search results, the query can quickly provide approximate (lower bound) facet counts. This means the counts reflect at least that many results, but there might be more matching results beyond the 10,000 limit.
  • The result_page subquery produces the first page of search results displayed to the user. It selects only the top 50 records from search_results, ordered by Likes and AlbumId. This is what the user initially sees.
  • the rating_counts subquery calculates the facet counts for Rating. It groups all the records in search_results by their Rating and counts how many results fall into each rating category.
  • The genres_counts subquery calculates the facet counts for Genres. As it's an array, join with UNNEST(Genres) to treat each genre within the array as a separate row for counting.

Retrieve subsequent pages

When you query for successive pages after the initial facet query, you can reuse the facet counts returned from the first page.

For more information on how to paginate, see Use key-based pagination.