Full text is a critical point when it comes to mysql. It used to have that feature in MyISAM but that’s not really maintained anymore nor it is advised to use unless you have a very specific use case in which it might make sense. There are 3rd party solution which takes the problem away (Lucene, Sphinx, Solr, ElasticSearch) but all bring extra complexity to your setup which has its own cost. So do you need to give up on fulltext search if you’re using MySQL + InnoDB? No! Definitely not.

Alternatives for full-text search in MySQL

I have an live database with 9000+ products with category, brand and short description which is perfect to test my searches on. I’m going to run the queries many times and use profile information to collect more granular and accurate timing information.

LIKE

Well… It’s not a real alternative but just for a sec see how well it behaves.

SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE b.name, …