TBH I hadn't known you could do weighted ranking with Postgres search before.
Curious there's no mention of zombodb[0] though, which gives you the full power of elasticsearch from within postgres (with consistency no, less!). You have to be willing to tolerate slow writes, of course, so using postgres' built-in search functionality still makes sense for a lot of cases.
Zombo is definitely super interesting and we should probably add a bit in the post about it. Part of the goal here was that you can do a LOT with Postgres, without adding one more system to maintain. Zombo is great if you have Elastic around, but want Postgres as the primary interface, but what if you don't want to maintain Elastic.
My ideal is always though to start with Postgres, and then see if it can solve my problem. I would never Postgres is the best at everything it can do, but for most things it is good enough without having another system to maintain and wear a pager for.
Zombo does at least promise to handle "complex reindexing processes" for you (which IME can be very painful) but yeah, I assume you'd still have to deal with shard rebalancing, hardware issues, network failures or latency between postgres and elastic, etc etc.
The performance and cost implications of Zombo are more salient tradeoffs in my mind – if you want to index one of the main tables in your app, you'll have to wait for a network roundtrip and a multi-node write consensus on every update (~150ms or more[0]), you can't `CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY`, etc.
All that said, IMO the fact that Zombo exists makes it easier to pitch "hey lets just build search with postgres for now and if we ever need ES's features, we can easily port it to Zombo without rearchitecting our product".
Curious there's no mention of zombodb[0] though, which gives you the full power of elasticsearch from within postgres (with consistency no, less!). You have to be willing to tolerate slow writes, of course, so using postgres' built-in search functionality still makes sense for a lot of cases.
[0] https://github.com/zombodb/zombodb