GraphAcademy
Course

Full-Text Search in Neo4j

Create and query full-text indexes for case-insensitive search

40 minutes6 lessons across 1 module
CypherIntermediate
About this lab

In this 40-minute lab, you will learn

Searching text in a database sounds straightforward until you try it. Exact property lookups work when you know the precise value, but users rarely search that way. They type partial words, misspell names, and expect results regardless of capitalization.

In this lab, you will create full-text indexes in Neo4j and query them using Lucene syntax. By the end, you will have built a movie search feature that finds films by title and description, handles fuzzy and wildcard queries, and enriches the results with cast and genre information from the graph.

You will work with the movies dataset —a graph of movies, actors, and directors connected by ACTED_IN and DIRECTED relationships.

  • Full-text indexes

    Create full-text indexes on node properties for efficient text search.

  • Search operators

    Use wildcards, fuzzy matching, and boolean operators to find results.

  • Relevance scoring

    Understand what the relevance score means and use it to filter and rank search results.

Course content

1 module, 40 minutes.

  1. 6 lessons
    1. Why Full-Text Indexes5 min
    2. Create and Query a Full-Text Index8 min
    3. Search Operators5 min
    4. Search with Operators8 min
    5. Scores and Graph Traversal5 min
    6. Build a Movie Search with Cast and Crew9 min
Further reading

Posts from the GraphAcademy blog.

5 min read

Cypher Best Practices: Map Projections, List Comprehensions, and COLLECT Subqueries

Three Cypher patterns that make queries cleaner, faster, and safer —map projections for shaped output, list comprehensions for inline transforms, and COLLECT subqueries for nested data without N+1.

Adam CowleyRead post