[TYPO3] mySQL, indexing & tt_news issue

[David Green]

Hi list, :-)

In the website I manage (www.beep.ac.uk) (core 3.81), I have tt_news 
working nicely, with categories, and all cached and indexed - great. 
But, this has caused a headache for the site search. Multiple navigation 
routes through the news page (because of categories) has led to the site 
indexer creating a very large number of entries. A quick SQL query shows 
40000 entries in the index_fulltext table from only 264 news records.

As a result:
1) I can't flush these records out using the usual BE 
web/info/indexed_search module - it times out when trying to retrieve so 
many records, so I never get as far as the delete button.
2) Overall site Searching has slowed down massively - just too many 
entries to search through.
3) Any site search request that happens to hit on anything in a news 
record returns multple entries. Search for "fish" and I get 5 genuine 
page hits and 2000 hits relating to only 5 actual news items.

Does anyone have any advice please on
a) how to make the indexer only read and store each news entry once
b) the best way to flush out the excessive number of indexing records 
for this page. (The DB table structure is complex for this module and I 
don't want to do it by manual SQL without really knowing what I'm doing.)

I've trawled the lists for hours and found 1 person asking the same 
thing last year, who had no reply.

Many thanks. Hoping to meet some of you at T3DD06 next month :-)
Dave Green