Implementing a search box - best practices

Question

I'm implementing a simple search box, to allow visitors to search for merchandise, which is held in a table. I can see two main approaches, each with their pro's and cons:
The merchandise data has several fields that could be potentially employed in the search. long description, short description and title.
A thorough search would look through each long description field, which is 100 chars long. The downside being the speed hit, searching such a large field.
A quick search would look through the title field - quick but not thorough
Alternatively I could create a separate table, searchTags, which contains a list of keywords for each item of merchandis - quicker but not as thorough
Just wondering what type of apporach people use ?

Answer 1

Ah, ok, I'll do it with LIKE
I plan to get it up and running and record the type of things people are searching for. Having seen some of the things people type into a search box, I'll need to employ some of CF's stirng and list functions to break down the search string in a series of words, then search for each one.
For example if someone typed "Silver Jewellery", it wouldn't bring up any results, as there's no occurence of that string in the database.
However, if I break that down into "Silver" and "Jewellery" that would produce results.
Think I can use CF's string and list functions such as listToArray, for that.