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)

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')

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.