I am trying to find the nearest match against a given name with mysql. The scoring is for the first two results the same, but looking at it I would rather get the second one as it fit's the name almost. SELECT ID, name, MATCH (`name`) AGAINST ('Superocean Héritage 42mm' IN BOOLEAN MODE) as `score` FROM cat_names cs WHERE MATCH (`name`) AGAINST ('Superocean Héritage 42mm' IN BOOLEAN MODE) ORDER BY `score` DESC The result: Superocean Héritage 6.3744072914123535 Superocean Héritage 42 6.3744072914123535 Superocean Héritage 46 6.3744072914123535 Is there a way to tweak the query in order to retrieve the second result correctly? Additionally the fulltext search returns a low quality score for exact matches: Big Bang Aero Bang 9.445959091186523 Big Bang 44 mm 6.32852840423584 Big Bang Caviar 6.32852840423584 Big Bang Jeans 6.32852840423584 Big Bang Meca-10 6.32852840423584 Big Bang Sang Bleu 6.32852840423584 Big Bang Unico 6.32852840423584 Spirit of Big Bang 6.32852840423584 Big Bang 41 mm 6.32852840423584 Big Bang Broderie 6.32852840423584 Big Bang Ferrari 6.32852840423584 Big Bang King 6.32852840423584 Big Bang Pop Art 6.32852840423584 Big Bang Tutti Frutti 6.32852840423584 Big Bang 6.32852840423584 The exact match has the lowest score.