title: How to handle single character search terms in MS-SQL FreeText searching?
body: <p>I am having a problem with a FreeText search, currently running on a SQL 2000 server.  </p>
  
  <p>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 submitting the query.  </p>
  
  <p>For example searches like 'Texas A &amp; M' end up only querying for 'Texas' which returns a ton of irrelevant records.</p>
  
  <p>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?  </p>
  
  <p>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.</p>