This is because
a typical index works by sorting the strings in alphabetical order, parsing them from left to right??”just like
names in a phone book are sorted, for example. These indexes speed up searches when you know the letters
(or characters) the search string starts with, but they are useless when you??™re looking for words that
reside inside a string.
The good news is that MySQL has a feature named FULLTEXT indexes, which are specifically
designed to allow for efficient and powerful text searches. FULLTEXT indexes are similar to
normal indexes, but they parse the whole content of string columns (such as product names
and descriptions).
A FULLTEXT index will speed up dramatically operations of searching for a particular word
(or set of words) inside a product description, for example. This index allows performing such
operations without performing the full-table scans that happens when LIKE is used.
MySQL full-text search is much faster and smarter than the previously mentioned method
(using the LIKE operator). Here are its main advantages:
??? Search results are ordered based on search relevance.
??? Small words are ignored. Words that aren??™t at least four characters long??”such as ???and???,
???so???, and so on??”are removed by default from the search query.
??? Advanced features such as MySQL full-text searches can also be performed in Boolean mode.
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