How to implement full text search in MySQL

· Category: SQL & Databases

Short answer

MySQL supports full-text search through FULLTEXT indexes on CHAR, VARCHAR, and TEXT columns, queried with MATCH ... AGAINST.

Steps

  1. Create a full-text index: CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX idx_content ON articles(content);
  2. Search with natural language: SELECT * FROM articles WHERE MATCH(content) AGAINST('database optimization');
  3. Use boolean mode for advanced operators: AGAINST('+MySQL -Oracle' IN BOOLEAN MODE);
  4. Search multiple columns: MATCH(title, content) AGAINST('search term')
  5. Rank results by relevance: SELECT *, MATCH(content) AGAINST('term') AS relevance FROM articles ORDER BY relevance DESC;

Tips

  • Use InnoDB full-text search for transactional consistency.
  • Set ft_min_word_len or innodb_ft_min_token_size to include short words.

Common issues

  • Stopwords and short words are ignored by default, which may surprise users searching for common terms.
  • Full-text indexes require sufficient data to produce meaningful relevance scores.r