#94 BigQuery’s SEARCH function only works with ASCII characters
Admittedly, it may not have been my brightest idea to use BigQuery as the search backend for poketto.me. But since Firebase doesn’t have built-in full-text search, I would have needed to add another tool to my stack anyway. I figured BigQuery would be easier than managing something external like Apache Lucene or Elasticsearch. Plus, BigQuery has a built-in SEARCH(...) function, so why not give it a try? As it turns out, SEARCH(...) is really more of a token-based text analyzer than a true search function: 1️⃣ It splits both the search term and the text into tokens (words). 2️⃣ It matches full tokens only. 3️⃣ It returns just TRUE or FALSE—no offsets, no match lengths. 🤯 And worst of all: It only works with ASCII. Yes. Like it’s 1979. ...