[kmike]

Erwin: well, I have to tidy up and clean the code from some custom tweaks first. Also, my hack changes search template a bit, like vb2 version of this hack did - there're 4 search fields instead of just one:
Search for items including these words:
and excluding these words:
and optionally including these words:
search for exact phrase:

That said, are you sure your search queries would run faster without LEFT JOIN? From my tests, that LEFT JOIN doesn't add substantial processing time, it only causes thread table locking which in turn causes peaks of load on frontend server.