Eliminate LIKE% in MySQL: Use Full‑Text Search for Efficient Fuzzy Queries
This article explains why using LIKE% for fuzzy searches in MySQL is inefficient, introduces InnoDB full‑text search (available since MySQL 5.6), describes inverted indexes, shows how to create and query full‑text indexes with natural language, boolean, and query‑expansion modes, discusses relevance calculation, stopwords, token‑size parameters, and provides the syntax for dropping full‑text indexes.
