Without seeing actual examples of the data you are looking at this may be a bit difficult, but I have to ask the question, is your data not comma delimited by any chance.

If this is the case, then set the delimiter as comma when importing, and then have this imported to the seperate fields as you described that you would like to create.

The you may want to place full text indices on the columns to speed up your search functions.

Not that I know too much about full text indices, but if I had searches on strings, thats the first place I would investigate.