Looking now (no longer on my phone) it's a bit more complex than that: while MySQL has supported FULLTEXT indexes since 3.23.23 (2000-09-01) [1] if you wanted t

Looking now (no longer on my phone) it's a bit more complex than that: while MySQL has supported FULLTEXT indexes since 3.23.23 (2000-09-01) [1] if you wanted to use InnoDB (and you probably did -- it was much better than MyISAM [2]) you initially couldn't use FULLTEXT. That was added in v5.6 [3], and at the time I was developing this software the standard option was to set up Sphinx. I've edited the post to add some of this history, so future readers understand this was about whether to add a dependency on an external indexing service. [1] http://dev.cs.ovgu.de/db/mysql/News-3.23.x.html http://dev.cs.ovgu.de/db/mysql/News-3.23.x.html ("Full-text search via the MATCH() function and FULLTEXT index type (for MyISAM files). This makes FULLTEXT a reserved word.") [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7492771/should-i-use-myisam-or-innodb-tables-for-my-mysql-database https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7492771/should-i-use-myi... [3] https://downloads.mysql.com/docs/mysql-5.6-relnotes-en.pdf https://downloads.mysql.com/docs/mysql-5.6-relnotes-en.pdf ("MySQL now supports FULLTEXT indexes for InnoDB tables.")