MySQL fulltext relevancy

Question

I usually copy all text from appropriate columns into a single column and fulltext index that. Do you think that's the best way to do it, for relevancy, or should each column have its own index?

For example, if I had a blog table I would copy the title and a plain text version of the post to a single indexed column. To achieve the best relevancy, would you do this or index the title and the plain text post separately?

Answer 1

This is a bit long for a comment.

The matches() expression can take multiple columns. So, in most cases, building a separate index on each column is reasonable. Particularly if you want to search each column separately.

You can review the documentation here.