Search overview¶
Percona Server for MongoDB supports Full-text Search and Vector Search through mongot, a dedicated search service that works alongside mongod. Together, they enable applications to perform keyword-based, semantic, and AI-powered searches without moving data to an external search platform.
You can create search indexes on your collections and use aggregation pipeline stages such as $search, $searchMeta, and vector similarity queries to retrieve relevant results.
mongot is included with Percona Server for MongoDB and is available in binary distributions and installation packages.
What is mongot?¶
mongot is a companion process that builds and maintains search indexes for your MongoDB collections. While mongod stores and manages your application data, mongot creates optimized search indexes and processes search queries.
The two services communicate internally during query execution:
mongodstores documents and handles database operations.mongotmaintains search indexes.- Search queries are processed by
mongot, while mongod retrieves the matching documents and returns the results to the client.
This architecture separates search workloads from core database operations while keeping the indexed data synchronized with the database.
Search types¶
Percona Server for MongoDB supports the following search types. Choose the type that matches your query patterns:
| Search type | Query stages | Index type | Use for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full-text search | $search, $searchMeta |
search |
Relevance-ranked text queries, autocomplete, faceting, and highlighting |
| Vector search | $vectorSearch |
vectorSearch |
Semantic similarity queries using machine learning embeddings |
Full-text search¶
Full-text Search lets you search text stored in one or more fields using relevance-based ranking. It supports capabilities such as:
- Keyword and phrase searches
- Boolean operators
- Fuzzy matching
- Wildcard searches
- Field-specific searches
- Relevance scoring
Use cases include:
- Product catalog search
- Documentation search
- Blog and article search
- Customer support knowledge bases
For information about the search architecture and the eventual consistency model, see Search in Percona Server for MongoDB.