Question

So apparently if a Mysql table’s fulltext index contains a keyword that appears in 50% of the data rows, that keyword will be ignored by the match query

So if I have a table with the fulltext index ‘content’ which contains 50 entries
and 27 of the entries contains the word ‘computer’ in the content field, and I run the query:

SELECT * 
  FROM `table` 
 WHERE MATCH(`content`) AGAINST ('computer'); 

…the computer query will return zero results since computer appears in more than 50% of the entries and hence the keyword is ignored…

is there a way to disable this functionality especially since this is problematic in the beginning phase of the database’s lifespan

Answer 1

Use BOOLEAN full-text searches to bypass 50% feature.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-boolean.html