can't get fulltext to work

[Matthew Boehm]

Ok. I tried the sample table/data that is on the FULLTEXT info page and that works. But using my own data doesn't seem to work:

mysql> show create table customer_notes\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
Table: customer_notes
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `customer_notes` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`customer_id` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
`datestamp` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
`agent_id` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
`thecomments` text NOT NULL,
UNIQUE KEY `id` (`id`),
FULLTEXT KEY `thecomments` (`thecomments`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT id, thecomments FROM customer_notes;
+----+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| id | thecomments |
+----+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| 9 | seems like the fax machine at their place works. |
| 8 | harry potter is my favorite book series |
| 7 | hello this is a test sentence to test the search abilities of the search program. |
+----+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT id, thecomments FROM customer_notes WHERE MATCH (thecomments) AGAINST ('the');
Empty set (0.00 sec)

That should return 2 rows. But it doesn't.

More examples:

mysql> SELECT id, thecomments FROM customer_notes WHERE MATCH (thecomments) AGAINST ('harry');
+----+-----------------------------------------+
| id | thecomments |
+----+-----------------------------------------+
| 8 | harry potter is my favorite book series |
+----+-----------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT id, thecomments FROM customer_notes WHERE MATCH (thecomments) AGAINST ('the');
Empty set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT id, thecomments FROM customer_notes WHERE MATCH (thecomments) AGAINST ('my');
Empty set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT id, thecomments FROM customer_notes WHERE MATCH (thecomments) AGAINST ('book');
+----+-----------------------------------------+
| id | thecomments |
+----+-----------------------------------------+
| 8 | harry potter is my favorite book series |
+----+-----------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT id, thecomments FROM customer_notes WHERE MATCH (thecomments) AGAINST ('is');
Empty set (0.00 sec)


Seems almost random. What gives?