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Upvoted, and I'll pile on. Wordnet [1] already has addons for Postgres.

[1] - https://github.com/taotetek/wordnet-postgres

Can you clarify... does this addon simply store the Wordnet data inside Postgres, or actually let the postgres full-text search do query-expansion-to-synonyms?

Sure. There are functions in this package. This link is better, which explains how the functions will work.

http://wnsqlbuilder.sourceforge.net/sql.html

We looked into PostgreSQL search for a bit, but didn't see a way to train search results from past conversions. Does anyone know if this is possible?

Interesting. I'll have to look into PostgreSQL's full text search. Does it support token filters similar to Elasticsearch?

To a degree, and is also very customizeable. It breaks things out to the lexeme level, read http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/interactive/textsearch-in....

I recently had to implement search on my product and found Postgres' full-text search to be fairly impressive. More than enough for what I needed.

Implemented through the wonderful textacular gem: https://github.com/textacular/textacular