Hi,
To the best of my knowledge, MySQL (like any other RDBMS), doesn't provide multi-column keyword search facility. My guess is that you have to iterate over the columns of desired tables and create text-indexes on every texual attribute that you think your keywords may appear in them. You need to write a procedure to iterate over all of them, and combine the results to show to the user.
Thanks to the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), I am currently working on building a multi-column multi-table keyword search engine for MySQL and we're planning a release for late summer.
http://code.google.com/soc/mysql/appinfo.html?csaid=B01A755F6D9927C5
Given that you are having such a problem right now, let me ask you a few questions:
1- When you ask a query with multiple keywords, do you want tuples that have all the keywords? Or tuples with some of the keywords are also desired?
2- It may happen that a keyword appears in a tuple in table A, and another keyword appears in table B, but the two tuples are connected via some join path, e.g., A.custid = B.custid. In such cases, do you prefer to have a joined tuple (A join B) in your results, or you prefer two different tuples with incomplete set of keywords in them?
I am asking you, and anyone else who may have happened to think about multi-column multi-table keyword search.
Best,
--mayssam