Help needed - SELECT query optimization

Hi, I have a mysql database with one table in it, currently it contains 36,807 records and it costs 6.8MB of space, every night another thousand~ of rows are being added to the table. The scheme (as taken from phpmyadmin) is like follows: CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS search ( id int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment, time int(10) default NULL, unique varchar(255) collate utf8_unicode_ci default NULL, site varchar(50) collate utf8_unicode_ci default NULL, url varchar(255) collate utf8_unicode_ci default NULL, filename varchar(255) collate utf8_unicode_ci default NULL, snippet varchar(255) collate utf8_unicode_ci default NULL, tags varchar(255) collate utf8_unicode_ci default NULL, password varchar(255) collate utf8_unicode_ci default NULL, PRIMARY KEY (id) ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci AUTO_INCREMENT=44306 ; insert example: INSERT INTO search VALUES (null, 1225041602, '110755357', 'rapidshare', ' http://rapidshare.com/files/110755357/Taxi4.By.HuNTeR.part1.rar', 'Taxi4.By.HuNTeR.part1.rar', 'Taxi 4 (2007) DVDRip XviD - KL', '', '--'),(null, 1225041602, '110756297', 'rapidshare', ' http://rapidshare.com/files/110756297/Taxi4.By.HuNTeR.part2.rar', 'Taxi4.By.HuNTeR.part2.rar', 'Taxi 4 (2007) DVDRip XviD - KL', '', '--'),(null, 1225041602, '110767009', 'rapidshare', ' http://rapidshare.com/files/110767009/Taxi4.By.HuNTeR.part3.rar', 'Taxi4.By.HuNTeR.part3.rar', 'Taxi 4 (2007) DVDRip XviD - KL', '', '--'),(null, 1225041602, '110768015', 'rapidshare', ' http://rapidshare.com/files/110768015/Taxi4.By.HuNTeR.part4.rar', 'Taxi4.By.HuNTeR.part4.rar', 'Taxi 4 (2007) DVDRip XviD - KL', '', '--'),(null, 1225041602, '110779013', 'rapidshare', ' http://rapidshare.com/files/110779013/Taxi4.By.HuNTeR.part5.rar', 'Taxi4.By.HuNTeR.part5.rar', 'Taxi 4 (2007) DVDRip XviD - KL', '', '--'),(null, 1225041602, '110792243', 'rapidshare', ' http://rapidshare.com/files/110792243/Taxi4.By.HuNTeR.part6.rar', 'Taxi4.By.HuNTeR.part6.rar', 'Taxi 4 (2007) DVDRip XviD - KL', '', '--'),(null, 1225041602, '110793721', 'rapidshare', ' http://rapidshare.com/files/110793721/Taxi4.By.HuNTeR.part7.rar', 'Taxi4.By.HuNTeR.part7.rar', 'Taxi 4 (2007) DVDRip XviD - KL', '', '--'); It should be a rapidshare links database (which updates with a PHP crawler I wroted last Saturday). I would like to change the snippet to title and add another column for the snippet, My main queries are INSERT's - a big insert (usually 10-100 links per insert) in each hour. My crawler is checking if the link it is about to add is already in the database with a select query like this: SELECT id FROM tbl_name WHERE unique = '%_UNIQUE_VARIABLE_%' I'm definiatly not an database scheme expert, I'm looking to optimaize the table for fast select queries (to check if file is already exists) And for fast filename-based search (select * from tbl_name where filename like '%_WHATEVER_%') The unique colmn is used for other websites unique ID's as well so I don't think I have any chance to crop it's length. I probably can change the site colmn to numeric id or something (I'm just about doing that) - but this is not the real problems, I have heard about something called Indexes but I have no idea what this is about. I hope I will find an answer, or a path where to look for in order to get this table optimaized, Thanks in Advance, Nitsan