IBM STAIRS in the context of IBM 3270

In text retrieval, full-text search refers to techniques for searching a single computer-stored document or a collection in a full-text database. Full-text search is distinguished from searches based on metadata or on parts of the original texts represented in databases (such as titles, abstracts, selected sections, or bibliographical references).

In a full-text search, a search engine examines all of the words in every stored document as it tries to match search criteria (for example, text specified by a user). Full-text-searching techniques appeared in the 1960s, for example IBM STAIRS from 1969, and became common in online bibliographic databases in the 1990s. Many websites and application programs (such as word processing software) provide full-text-search capabilities. Some web search engines, such as the former AltaVista, employ full-text-search techniques, while others index only a portion of the web pages examined by their indexing systems.

A full-text database or a complete-text database is a database that contains the complete text of books, dissertations, journals, magazines, newspapers or other kinds of textual documents. They differ from bibliographic databases (which contain only bibliographical metadata, including abstracts in some cases) and non-bibliographic databases (such as directories and numeric databases).

One of the earliest systems was IBM STAIRS, introduced in 1973.