The additional learning / overhead is definitely worth while. What if you wanted to use, Relevancy, Thesaurus, Inflections, Weightings, Boolean Logic, Wildcards, etc. These are all possible with FTS. Having spoken to Microsoft SQL / FTS Program Managers I understand they are considering building (or have already) FTS into the actual SQL Server 2008 database engine itself rather than having it as a separate service. This should increase index speeds further and will certainly increase the performance of any query which contains FTS logic. FTS is the only smart way to do this sort of thing.