Question

I am having a problem with boolean searching, firstly I thought it was something wrong with my database/table but then i tried creating following sample table with 1 column and sample values and result is same, it successfully runs for some words and fails for others, any ideas?

Queries that run successfully:

SELECT * FROM `temp` WHERE (match (txt) against ('develo*' IN BOOLEAN MODE)>0 ) 
SELECT * FROM `temp` WHERE (match (txt) against ('devel*' IN BOOLEAN MODE)>0 ) 
SELECT * FROM `temp` WHERE (match (txt) against ('senio*' IN BOOLEAN MODE)>0 ) 

But when I try doing similar search against words ‘second’ or ‘third’, it fails

SELECT * FROM `temp` WHERE (match (txt) against ('secon*' IN BOOLEAN MODE)>0 ) 
SELECT * FROM `temp` WHERE (match (txt) against ('third*' IN BOOLEAN MODE)>0 ) 

— Following is the sample table and values —–

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `temp` (
  `txt` varchar(30) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

--
-- Dumping data for table `temp`
--

INSERT INTO `temp` (`txt`) VALUES
('developer'),
('Developer'),
('Developer senior'),
('senior developer'),
('second job'),
('job second'),
('third'),
('third job'),
('job third');

Answer 1

As stopwords list is applied in BOOLEAN MODE match, words second and third are just ignored by the engine.

You can override the default stopwords list with your own, as described here:

To override the default stopword list, set the ft_stopword_file system
variable. […] The variable value should be the path name of the file
containing the stopword list, or the empty string to disable stopword
filtering. The server looks for the file in the data directory unless
an absolute path name is given to specify a different directory. After
changing the value of this variable or the contents of the stopword
file, restart the server and rebuild your FULLTEXT indexes.