>> I'm not sure that putting in to_tsvector calls there would be an
>> improvement, though, since at that point we haven't introduced
>> to_tsvector.
Uh ... wait a moment ... stop the presses. Thomas is looking at
beta1 documentation. CVS HEAD handles this a bit better I think:
http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/textsearch-intro.html#TEXTSEARCH-MATCHING
So the first thing is to go bug the www team about updating the online
8.3beta docs, which I shall do forthwith.
regards, tom lane