[calorie]

True, but if you use MATCH AGAINST then you may be at the "mercy" of MySQL's minimum word length, stop words, fifty percent threshold, definition of word, special characters. For anyone interested, visit here. It's a matter of preference, so "only apply these changes if wanted."

Originally Posted by AndrewD

Perhaps it's worth explaining the difference between boolean fulltext searches and LIKE searches in MySQL?

Early versions of this hack used LIKE (which is also used by the release version of VBulletin). This allows you to find a search string, with an optional wildcard or so. Boolean fulltext also allows you to look for combinations of words, strings, etc, so that if you search for (e.g.) +book -page, you will find entries with the word book but not page.