Help creating a search model for my new website

[eluser]unmillon[/eluser]
Hello guys,

This is my first post here at codeigniter's forum, I'm new to codeigniter and so far I love how easy it is to make a website using it. I started working on my first project using codeigniter for a website called BrowseForMusic.com. I'm 90% done with the site except that the search part of it is not working as it should.

I'm using fulltext search with MySQL database but the problem I'm having is that I can't search for words with 3 characters or less. For example "DMX" which i have tons of records in my database, it returned 0 because it only has 3 characters.

Since I'm using share hosting, the hosting company doesn't want to disable the 3 words feature in MySQL config file.

Can someone help me create a model that will fix this problem?

Right now this is what I'm currently using at the site as a work around. But i would like to have a better way to search and display more relevant results.

Code:

if (strlen($search_words) < 4) {    
            $query = $this->db->query("SELECT * FROM songs WHERE deadlink='No' AND artistName LIKE '". $search_words ."' OR title LIKE '". $search_words ."' LIMIT $offset, $num ");
        } else {
            $query = $this->db->query("SELECT *, MATCH (s.artistName,s.title) AGAINST('" . $search_words ."') AS score  FROM songs AS s WHERE MATCH (s.artistName,s.title) AGAINST('" . $search_words ."') HAVING score > 0.2 AND deadlink='No' ORDER BY score DESC LIMIT $offset, $num ");
        }

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Eddie