Dave,
This pertains to your use of fulltext in the suggested MyIsam table. We are dealing with a fulltext issue at the moment on a InnoDB table for products. We need InnoDB for that and we need a fulltext key. Having to keep the Products table of the Innodb type, would mitigating this situation require a separate MyIsam table used for a search-&-results page with a detail page link to the actual Products table? It feels like a strange logic with having to actively maintain an extra table.