sphinx search and 3 character search

Currently on a shared hosting package.

Need to be able to search 3 characters in search ie "the YNC", I contacted the host and they said 'no can do'. Is it possible that if I use sphinx search I will be able to get this functionality?

Pro's and con's?

[Lynne]

What sort of documentation? There is stuff in the manual telling you what to change:

Note:
The minimum and maximum length of words to be indexed is defined by the ft_min_word_len and ft_max_word_len system variables (available as of MySQL 4.0.0). The default minimum value is four characters. The default maximum depends on your version of MySQL. If you change either value, you must rebuild your FULLTEXT indexes. For example, if you want three-character words to be searchable, you can set the ft_min_word_len variable by putting the following lines in an option file:

[mysqld]
ft_min_word_len=3

Then restart the server and rebuild your FULLTEXT indexes. Also note particularly the remarks regarding myisamchk in the instructions following this list.

For more on Fulltext Search from MySQL please visit:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/...ne-tuning.html