+

A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each row that is returned.

-

A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any of the rows that are returned.

(no operator)

By default (when neither + nor - is specified) the word is optional, but the rows that contain it are rated higher. This mimics the behavior of MATCH() ... AGAINST() without the IN BOOLEAN MODE modifier.

> <

These two operators are used to change a word's contribution to the relevance value that is assigned to a row. The > operator increases the contribution and the < operator decreases it. See the example below.

( )

Parentheses are used to group words into subexpressions. Parenthesized groups can be nested.

~

A leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word's contribution to the row's relevance to be negative. This is useful for marking “noise” words. A row containing such a word is rated lower than others, but is not excluded altogether, as it would be with the - operator.

*

The asterisk serves as the truncation operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word to be affected.

"

A phrase that is enclosed within double quote (‘"’) characters matches only rows that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed. The full-text engine splits the phrase into words, performs a search in the FULLTEXT index for the words. Prior to MySQL 5.0.3, the engine then performed a substring search for the phrase in the records that were found, so the match must include non-word characters in the phrase. As of MySQL 5.0.3, non-word characters need not be matched exactly: Phrase searching requires only that matches contain exactly the same words as the phrase and in the same order. For example, "test phrase" matches "test, phrase" in MySQL 5.0.3, but not before.

If the phrase contains no words that are in the index, the result is empty. For example, if all words are either stopwords or shorter than the minimum length of indexed words, the result is empty.