Full-text search in Firestore
For years, whatever new feature we announced for Firestore, the bulk of the responses was some variant of:
Again, no full-text search
And while I think that text-search is inherently quite different from a database query, I always understood where the commenters and mockers were coming from: it’s quite ridiculous that a company that is known for its Search product has not ofference a full-text search API since the downturn of the original App Engine.
Well… we’re in 2026, and things are quite different now.
In this post, I’ll give an overview of the full-text search options available for Firestore users, and shows some results and performance characteristics. Since this is brand new, I expect there will be a lot of improvements and changes in the coming months, but this is what we have as of this writing.
Firestore Enterprise edition
APIs that allow full-text search
LIKE
REGEX
SEARCH with documentMatches (early access)
Requires a special index to be build. Only can match on the whole document, not on a specific field.
