How to handle single character search terms in MS-SQL FreeText searching?

I am having a problem with a FreeText search, currently running on a SQL 2000 server.

In a table of approximately 1.3 million rows which contain company names, I am attempting to use a FreeText query. However since SQL Server strips out special characters and single characters when building its index, our code does the same when subm开发者_开发知识库itting the query.

For example searches like 'Texas A & M' end up only querying for 'Texas' which returns a ton of irrelevant records.

What's the best-practice for handling these sorts of search queries? Would this problem be rectified by upgrading to a newer version of SQL Server?

At this point a third-party indexing engine like Lucene is not an option, even if it would fix the problem, which I am not sure of.

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You can try using a single character wildcard '_' similar to:

WHERE myColumn like 'Texas_A_&_M'

or

WHERE myColumn like 'Texas%A_&_M' 

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You may check if improvements of in SQL Server 2005 can solve your problem: SQL Server 2005 Full-Text Search: Internals and Enhancements, in particular about Noise Words in New Features for the Developer.

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if you are searching company names and not long passages of text, why not just use LIKE?

...
WHERE
    CompanyName LIKE '%Texas A%&%M%'