Thank you. Yes, I’m aware it doesn’t do mid-word matches. This is not working for strings that start a word. There’s maybe 5000 rows in the table right now – very small. (by the way, how many can it reasonably handle? Or is it simply limited by your server processing power?)
Any suggestions on what configuration I could check? Again, it returns partial matches (start or end of a word) when the match is in the post title or content, but not an associated custom field.
Thanks for the explanation about custom field selection. I understand.
Sorry, re: the highlighting – I’m wondering how to display the custom field content excerpt in the live search results. Is it a matter of adding code to the template files?