MySQL Fulltext Index not working

I recently moved from a standard wildcard search of my news table to making use of a MySQL Fulltext Index. At first everything seemed fine, until I was working with a staging copy of the data with very few rows. The fulltext search would return zero results no matter what string I used.

The query looked like so:

SELECT 		n.id, 
			DATE_FORMAT(n.added,'%b %e, %Y') AS added, 
			n.title, 
			n.user, 
			MATCH(n.article, n.title) AGAINST ('$search') AS score
FROM 		news n
WHERE 		MATCH(n.article, n.title) AGAINST ('$search')
HAVING 		score > 0.25
ORDER BY 	score DESC, n.added DESC, n.id DESC
LIMIT 		$offset, $limit

Researching online, I found that everything appeared to be in order. I of course verified there was a Fulltext Index on the staging copy. I verified the storage engine was myISAM. I verified that the query was working in production.

I found that the default mode was Natural Language which, according to the documentation, has a restriction in the sense that:

words that are present in 50% or more of the rows are considered common and do not match. Full-text searches are natural language searches if no modifier is given.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-search.html

With just a couple rows in the table it is common to hit this 50% limit often. Adding more data to the staging table resolved it. Or you can switch modes to use BOOLEAN.

SELECT 		n.id, 
			DATE_FORMAT(n.added,'%b %e, %Y') AS added, 
			n.title, 
			n.user, 
			MATCH(n.article, n.title) AGAINST ('$search' IN BOOLEAN MODE) AS score
FROM 		news n
WHERE 		MATCH(n.article, n.title) AGAINST ('$search' IN BOOLEAN MODE)
HAVING 		score > 0.25
ORDER BY 	score DESC, n.added DESC, n.id DESC
LIMIT 		$offset, $limit

This is working for me. There are limitations around this mode as well, such as not automatically sorting rows in order of decreasing relevance. That could be a deal-breaker for you. For my stage test, it is sufficient.

Hope this helps.