(Brion Vibber vibber@aludra.usc.edu):
Well, yes and no. If we don't parse the query into separate words, it doesn't matter how much we hand to it: a MATCH AGAINST( "Windows XP" ) will still turn up all the results for "Windows", whereas MATCH AGAINST( "Windows" ) AND MATCH AGAINST ("XP") returns nothing at all -- that's why we need to be aware of it and remove the too-short words from the search using our hackish boolean system.
However, it would be nice to spit out a little message to the effect of "The word 'XP' has been ignored in your search because MySQl doesn't like it," whatever the search method.
Yeah, the issues are intertwined a bit. BTW, I compiled MySQL on the wikipedia server with a minimum word length of 2, so "XP" works fine.