It’s very handy to have FT search out of the box, but there are several drawbacks attached. Problem is that MyISAM Full-text search is not designed to handle big amounts of text data. If you plan to index more than 1M documents you will probably need to take a look on the external search system like Lucene or Sphinx. For the usual LAMP-based service I personally would prefer to use Sphinx as it provides simple transition from MySQL FT and easy to integrate into any application (Sphinx basically could be queried via native API or via MySQL protocol.Mas:

http://astellar.com/2011/12/replacing-mysql-full-text-search-with-sphinx/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=replacing-mysql-full-text-search-with-sphinx