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How do you think this website does searches?

I'm working on a project that I need to search a text field. For example, we have text of PDF files in the database. User types "united states" and we need to bring back all the rows with that word.

This website's search is very fast https://www.courtlistener.com/

Type a letter "M". It brings back 1.5 million rows in 1138 ms

How do you think they do this? (I was thinking about using SQL Server Full Text search. I also thought about having "keywords")

I have SQL Server 2016 developer edition, VS 2015 community edition.

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Dave Baldwin

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Dave Baldwin

And a 'search' like that can be done simply with 'LIKE' statements in the WHERE clause.

SELECT * FROM masterlist WHERE field1 LIKE '%M%' OR field2 LIKE '%M%' OR field3 LIKE '%M%'

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Camillia

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Thanks, Dave. Let me think about this " the complete text would be in a separate file that is loaded only when it is requested."...

If the complete text is in another file...how can it be searchable? I think I need to make ..for example "title" searchable and keep that in the database column. So make only certain sections of the document searchable and only keep those sections in the database and the entire text in a separate file on the server?

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kaufmed