url shortening and clean urls

[eluser]intractve[/eluser]
Having a controller called article (http://yoursite.com/article/123/dash-sep...icle-title) is not bad in terms of SEO, it will give you equal ranking in SEO when used properly with sitemaps. So I would go with that in terms of speed in accessing your database entries. Doing Full Text searches is server intensive.

use the id to reference the article, and have the url helper, url_title() make dashed titles for you and save it in the db.

For Short Permalinks, you can checkout bit.ly API
http://code.google.com/p/bitly-api/wiki/...umentation

If you use this, You should shorten links and save it in your DB when the article is created and saved so that you dont make multiple links pointing to same article.
Advantage using this is that you can track usage statistics of your short links in bit.ly