no no no... don't do that... I hsouldn't have said that.
Don't add entries simply so that it's not 50%....
seriously. dont' do that. I was joking.
anyway, it's a feature because it was meant for searching for relevant text. relevant being the key word, here.
If a search result set has more than 50% or more records from the database, it's really not very relevant at all... it means it's too general.
Maybe it's hard to understand in the particular use you want it for...
Imagine searching for a webpage. What if you typed a word, and it gave you half the internet? That's no good, because it's not relevant.
you can read more in the documentation !
from mysql website:
The search for the word MySQL produces no results in the above example, because that word is present in more than half the rows. As such, it is effectively treated as a stopword (that is, a word with zero semantic value). This is the most desirable behaviour -- a natural language query should not return every second row from a 1GB table.
A word that matches half of rows in a table is less likely to locate relevant documents. In fact, it will most likely find plenty of irrelevant documents. We all know this happens far too often when we are trying to find something on the Internet with a search engine. It is with this reasoning that such rows have been assigned a low semantic value in this particular dataset.
