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...