MySQL Match Fulltext

Question

Im' trying to do a fulltext search with mysql, to match a string. The problem is that it's returning odd results in the first place.

For example, the string 'passat 2.0 tdi' :

            AND MATCH (
            records_veiculos.titulo, records_veiculos.descricao
            )
            AGAINST (
             'passat 2.0 tdi' WITH QUERY EXPANSION
            )

is returning this as the first result (the others are fine) :

Volkswagen Passat Variant 1.9 TDI- ANO 2003

wich is incorrect, since there's no "2.0" in this example.

What could it be?

edit: Also, since this will probably be a large database (expecting up to 500.000 records), will this search method be the best for itself, or would it be better to install any other search engine like Sphinx? Or in case it doesn't, how to show relevant results?

edit2: For the record, despite the question being marked as answered, the problem with the MySQL delimiters persists, so if anyone has a suggestion on how to escape delimiters, it would be appreciated and worth the 500 points at stake. The sollution I found to increase the resultset was to replace WITH QUERY EXPANSION with IN BOOLEAN MODE, using operators to force the engine to get the words I needed, like :

AND MATCH (
records_veiculos.titulo, records_veiculos.descricao
)
AGAINST (
 '+passat +2.0 +tdi' IN BOOLEAN MODE
)

It didn't solve at all, but at least the relevance of the results as changed significantly.

Answer 1

From the MySQL documentation on Fulltext search:

"The FULLTEXT parser determines where words start and end by looking for certain delimiter characters; for example, “ ” (space), “,” (comma), and “.” (period)."

This means that the period is delimiting the 2 and 0. So it's not looking for '2.0'; it's looking for '2' and '0', and not finding it. WITH QUERY EXPANSION is probably causing relevant related words to show up, thus obviating the need for '2' and '0' to be individual words in the result rankings. A character minimum may also be being enforced.

Answer 2

By default I believe mysql only indexes and matches words with 4 or more characters. You could also try escaping the period? It might be ignored this or otherwise using it as a stop character.