performing searches with random entries

I'm trying to take a variable in that would be usually 3 to 4 words (could be more or could be less). Right now, I'm exploding the variable and testing each individually, but this obviously is a pain with the more variables you get, and the result I get from the mysql search doesn't give me enough info to compare the outputs and then just give matching outputs. Am I looking at the result of the query wrong? Is there a function that does this? Any suggestions? Thanks, Brian