FullTextSearching with PHP/MySQL

I have what seems to be a growing problem implementing the search for my site. I was first using the basic LIKE query with MySQL and PHP but I found FullTextSearch to be more efficient in returning results.

The problem now is that FullTextSearch has a minimum word length of 4 words - I need to set this to 3. To do this I have checked the following link http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/...ne-tuning.html but as you will see it needs my host to set up an option file.

My hosts have told me they cannot update/change the option file since I am on shared server. This means I am stuck.

Does anyone know how I can resolve this issue - I have asked this same question in the database forum but without success. I am interested in learning how other PHP/MySQL developers perform searches. I thought FullTextSearch was brilliant, but if I cannot even search for words of 3 character lengths then thats no good. There must be other ways...

Can anyone offer any help/advice whatsoever...

why not just go back to using LIKE query. i dont think you will have much luck if the preset is 4.

There are other full text search engines for MySQL, e.g. Sphinx.
If you're on shared hosting though you are out of luck. Sorry.

It looks as though I will have to return to the LIKE query...

The reason I am using FullTextSearch in the first place is because I have a 'tags' field which has text such as 'fast red car'. If I search for 'car' then this will return that item. However if I search for 'slow car' then this item will not be returned.

In other words I want each separate word in my query to be searched against the 'tags' (and other) field[s] to find a match... does that make sense...? FullTextSearch worked very well..

in that case you need a loop.

Thanks for that - I think someone has mentioned the split function. However I'm still a little fuzzy on how to use it properly:

if $keyword = 'small red car';

and

$query = SELECT * FROM item WHERE item.name = $keyword AND item.tags = $keyword...

How do I change it to include the loop??

I'm guessing I split the keyword by spaces - so you get $k[0] = 'small' and so on...

But then how do I correctly search through each of these and return matches..? Do I do a search for each word in $k? I would want to return every single item which matches all of the keywords...

The great thing about FullTextSearch is the ability to sort by relevance or score. Is there a way to mimic this with LIKE query etc?

Thanks for the help;