MySql seems to be robust with respect to unbackslashed apostrophe ' characters. According to the SQL standard, you quote apostrophe characters by doubling them up - I don't have the mysql documentation handy to know whether backslashing should work. I haven't added an entry to check that searching for something like "It's isn't" would find anything. (This is testing with the librarian interface - assuming that the public interface is the same). The searches don't seem to guard the input string except to require it to be non-blank. This means that searches like "%" or "_" as SQL wildcards will select all rows and single letter searches would select all rows on which a searched column contains a word beginning with that letter. Similar single common words "the", .... could give large result sets. This could be slow and expensive on large databases. On the sample database, when the list of results wouldn't fit on one page, moving to the next pageful with the right-arrow worked fine - but trying to jump to a particular page using the numbers gave a nothing found page. (I'm running on Debian so this could be associated with MySQL version if it isn't repeatable).