When should PostgreSQL search use full-text, trigram, or both?

Use both for different retrieval jobs.

Need	Best starting point
Ranked document terms	PostgreSQL full-text search
Partial titles	Trigram index
Typo tolerance	Trigram similarity

create index articles_search_idx
on articles using gin (to_tsvector('english', title || ' ' || body));

create index articles_title_trgm_idx
on articles using gin (title gin_trgm_ops);

Combine their scores in the query, then inspect the real plan with EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS) before introducing a separate search service.

<!-- seed-answer:postgres-indexes-for-search:0 -->