I have made a file search engine using MySQL. Currently, it uses a unique indexed table where each file corresponds to an entry.

The field that I search into is the name of the file itself (so the field NAME is basically a varchar(255) ).

Now my table has more than 600 000 entries and the search is really slow (more than 10s - I don't think it is really because of my computer).

I think I made a wrong implementation of the structure of my tables. Would it be faster to parse the name of each file and to store the keywords into another table and to search into that table ?

Thanks a lot !

PS : how comes that searching a forum is so fast ?!

There are a lot of possibilities. The query could need to be optimized, you might need to restructure your indexes, or you might want to think about using fixed length records (it will waste space, but MySQL can lookup records via indexed fields very quickly with fixed length records). Use EXPLAIN to give you more information on what the server will do to execute your query.
http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/EXPLAIN.html