Test data for FULLTEXT searching

MySQL’s FULLTEXT search feature works best when it’s used on a large corpus of text. That is, for best results you need many rows. When the text corpus is too small, full text searching often returns strange results: the indexing process tries to work out common words. If the amount of text being indexed is too small, some words that shouldn’t really be flagged as common words will be.

If you’re hoping to experiment with fulltext search, you need, therefore, a bunch of text. Here’s a table of book titles and authors for that purpose. You can download it, unzip it, and load it into MySQL. (Don’t use this in production.)

Book Table.zip

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