Going with the FULLTEXT method you are at the mercy of what your host has for the minimum search character length. Many hosts have this set to a minimum of 4 characters while we have some customers that want to search for 2 or 3 character words.
FULLTEXT is definitely faster, but not flexible enough for some sites. The old method just used a custom built search engine that was a bit slower but allowed for more flexibility in the search length.
