Sometimes you just can't. One of my first projects as a freelancer involved hacking full-text search onto a niche news site hosted on a shared host with a share

Sometimes you just can't. One of my first projects as a freelancer involved hacking full-text search onto a niche news site hosted on a shared host with a shared MySQL instance (specced before my time, and not something I could change). Sphinx wasn't available, Lucene certainly wasn't an option, and the immutable MySQL fulltext config wouldn't let words of 3 letters or less be indexed. However, that wasn't good enough, because there were a lot of important 3-letter company names in the niche. So, what did I do? I prepended 'zzz' to every word before it went into the fulltext index. Dirty, hacky, inefficient, and let me deliver working functionality the same day the request came in.