BigQuery’s SEARCH function only works with ASCII characters

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

BigQuery on Build in Public

BigQuery’s SEARCH function only works with ASCII characters