Detecting word boundarys in a search

I have a search engine on my site using php/mysql. It works fine, but it doesn't detect word boundarys! Kind of annoying when you search for 'are' and come up with 'share'. I would like some tips on how to make it boundary sensitive. I imagine regular expressions would be useful here but I'm not very familiar with them.

Did you think about using a Full Text search? http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Fulltext_Search.html

Not sure if there is an easy regex. Depends a bit about the sort of values you're searching in. Are they all afanumeric?

Most entries would contain just letters but some may contain numbers aswell. I'll check out the link.