hi,

it is really funny how ft search works:
it seems to depend highly on what could be indexed, but it still doesn't  
follow a determined order.

consider the following queries:
select name from person where contains(name, 'hammer')
select name from person where contains(name, '"hammer*"')

the first is a query with a "simple term" and the second one with a  
"prefix term".
mssql docu says that a simple term "specifies a match for an exact word",  
but the first query returns other matches like "oberhammer" or  
"hammerschmied" - this is not an exact match for me; the found words  
rather consist of two words "ober", "schmied" and "hammer".

one would expect that the 1st and 2nd query work absolutely different but,  
even the 2nd returns a lot more results, they seem to differ just slightly.

when searching for 'ober' (instead of 'hammer'), the 2nd query returns  
"obermayr" and "oberlehner", but the 1st results only in "oberlehner",  
although "ober", "mayr" and "lehner" are single words themselves.
and why does it find "Tober" or "Dober" if i only searched for 'ober'?

i need to know the rules which mssql uses for fulltext search. can someone  
point me to a book or a website where i can find more information? or does  
somebody have a good explanation?
btw, we use sql2000 and a german collation.