I am feeling real bad now as I used the like query as OP did (although in MySQL) for implementing a custom search over two fields ( Name & Description ) in one of my personal projects. I thought it worked pretty well though and I was so happy about it.
Don't confuse full text search with word part search. If you have a list of names, you're probably looking for the latter one, where LIKE works fine and can be indexed with pg_trgrm.
