match() against() doesn't work but like '%$s%' does

Question

I have a fulltext field in my table. One of the rows is:

"this is the dog that ran over there"

I have the following mysql statements:

SELECT * 
  FROM `table` 
 WHERE MATCH (column) AGAINST ('dog that ran')

...returns 0 records

SELECT * 
  FROM `table` 
 WHERE `column` LIKE '%dog that ran%'

...returns 1 record

Why the difference? They should both return 1 record, right?

Answer 1

From my answer to another question:

Fulltext search has some bizarre quirks.

For example, the behaviour described in the last paragraphs of this page could be the reason for your problem:

.... for example, although the word “MySQL” is present in every row of the articles table shown earlier, a search for the word produces no results:

mysql> SELECT * FROM articles
    -> WHERE MATCH (title,body) AGAINST ('MySQL');
 Empty set (0.00 sec)

The search result is empty because the word “MySQL” is present in at least 50% of the rows. As such, it is effectively treated as a stopword. For large data sets, this is the most desirable behavior: A natural language query should not return every second row from a 1GB table. For small data sets, it may be less desirable.

The answer here would be to add more rows, or use boolean search.