Modified string search in Mysql Table

I have a string query to search (assuming "this is my first query" as an example).

And I am also having a table which consists of (id, title, rating, ... ) attributes.

What I want is to find out the search results of my string query which match with "title" attribute (probable or exact both).

But what if complete text i.e. "this is my first query" is not there then there will be no results if I do like

SELECT * FROM test WHERE title LIKE '%$query%';

What I am trying to think next is to fire another query with lesser character this time.. i.e. I will fire the same query using search string "this is my first quer" (y is truncated) and so on until I get my desired no. of results.

But my problem is:

1. This is very costly operation
2. I want search data to be sorted in order of descendi开发者_运维问答ng value of rating ( another field in "test" table)

Please help me out how can I proceed with this ?

1. Add index on this field and run query in loop. I don't like it.
2. Use fulltext searching http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/fulltext-search.htm in mysql.
3. Use standalone searching server like Sphinx http://sphinxsearch.com/