Hi, My head is swimming with lots of info gleaned from various newsgroups about using fulltext indexes in MySQL, but, I'm still not sure what the best solution would be for what I want to do. I'm concerned about the 3-char minimum and not being able to search on partial words (my version of MySQL doesn't support boolean fulltext searches). I have a simple News table that is structured like this: CREATE TABLE `news` ( `id` int(7) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment, `author` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', `headline` varchar(60) NOT NULL default '', `content` text NOT NULL, `url` text NOT NULL, UNIQUE KEY `id` (`id`), ) TYPE=MyISAM; I want searches for News to be on the author, headline and content fields. What is the best way to index and search this? A) Create a combined fulltext index: FULLTEXT (author,headline,content) -- and do searches using MATCH() and AGAINST(). B) Create a fulltext index only for the content field and use this kind of select: SELECT * FROM db WHERE author LIKE "%phrase%" OR headline LIKE "%phrase%" OR MATCH(content) AGAINST(phrase); C) None of the above ... is there a better way? Thanks a lot for any input or feedback! I'm completely lost! Monty -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php