MySQL Combining FULLTEXT with a LIKE Fallback - php

Question

I'm building my app to use a single search table for searching all different object types ie: posts, pages, products etc., based on this article.
My table layout looks like so:
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS myapp_search_index (
id int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,
language_id int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,
`type` varchar(24) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
object_id int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,
`text` text COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL
PRIMARY KEY (id,language_id),
FULLTEXT KEY `text.fdx` (`text`),
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci AUTO_INCREMENT=1;
My search query looks like so:
$items = $db->escape($query);
$query = $db->query("
SELECT *,
SUM(MATCH(text) AGAINST('+{$items}' IN BOOLEAN MODE)) as score
FROM {$db->prefix}search_index
WHERE MATCH(text) AGAINST('+{$items}' IN BOOLEAN MODE)
GROUP BY language_id, type, object_id
ORDER BY score DESC
LIMIT " . (int)$start . ", " . (int)$limit . "
");
This works great except where we run into fulltext limitations like stop words and min word length.
For instance I have 2 entries in the table for my About Us page, one holds the page title, and one holds the content of the page.
Running the query about us returns no results as about is a stop word, and us is less than the minimum 4 letters.
So, my thought was to create a conditional fallback query using a traditional LIKE parameter as such:
if (!$query->num_rows):
$query = $db->query("
SELECT *
FROM {$db->prefix}search_index
WHERE text LIKE '%{$items}%'
GROUP BY language_id, type, object_id
ORDER BY id DESC
LIMIT " . (int)$start . ", " . (int)$limit . "
");
endif;
And once again this works fine. My About Us page now comes up just fine in the results.
But what I'd like is to run this all in one query and maintain the score somehow.
Is this possible?
EDIT:
Ok so in response to Michael's answer and comments I've changed my query to this:
SELECT *,
SUM(MATCH(text) AGAINST('{$search}' IN BOOLEAN MODE)) as score
FROM {$db->prefix}test_index
WHERE (
MATCH(text) AGAINST('{$search}' IN BOOLEAN MODE)
AND text LIKE '%{$search}%')
OR text LIKE '%{$search}%'
GROUP BY language_id, type, object_id
ORDER BY score DESC
I set up a test table with 100K rows, 50K of which do contain my lorem ipsum search term.
This queries the entire table and returns results in 0.6379 microseconds without any query caching as of yet.
Can anyone tell me if this seems like a fair compromise?

Answer 1

Play around with natural language mode too with multi-word:
SELECT id,prod_name, match( prod_name )
AGAINST ( '+harpoon +article' IN NATURAL LANGUAGE MODE) AS relevance
FROM testproduct
ORDER BY relevance DESC
We often just go with solr integration, throwing json csv and text files at it.

Answer 2

There is not a way to elegantly combine fulltext search and LIKE together to get more results.
This is because the two predicates would have to be combined with an OR, which would in turn mean a full table scan (or full index scan if a suitable BTREE exists) is required to test the LIKE expression. All rows would have to be evaluated, which would remove any optimization you're getting from the fulltext search.
In the opposite situation, combining MATCH and LIKE using AND instead of OR -- in cases where the fulltext match returns insufficiently precise matches -- works great because the optimizer uses the fulltext index to find all possible matching rows, then filters the identified rows against the LIKE expression. (Fulltext indexes are almost always preferred by the optimizer, when other possible query plans exist.) Unfortunately, that's the opposite of what you need.