Difficulty making a fast search on my database

[The_ReAl]

Hello,
I have a news database with over 35 000 articles and I need something that can search through these articles at high speed.
Right now I use a fulltext search MATCH AGAINST, but every fulltext search query takes about 2 seconds. I have 3 blocks with news on every page (today, yesterday and last week), so I need 3 queries to get those articles. I use page tabs for every date/period. So today has 10 results per page and I can click on a page tab to get the next 10 (11-20). For example, I use LIMIT 11,20 in the query for the second page. To do this, I need to know how many articles there are in total, so I need another query per date/period. That is 6 queries in total, making the page take 12 seconds to load. I think that's too long.

Does anyone know a faster way to do this?

Thanks.

[Sxooter]

Are you sure you're using the full text search engine, and not just plain queries or something? Other than that, I don't know what to tell you off the top of my head, except to look at other full text search engines (PostgreSQL has a couple of engines available for it, tsearch2 being the best IMNSHO).

Got an example query and explain output for it?