sequential scan performance

Hi -

I have a table of about 3 million rows of city "aliases" that I need
to query using LIKE - for example:

select * from city_alias where city_name like '%FRANCISCO'


When I do an EXPLAIN ANALYZE on the above query, the result is:

  Seq Scan on city_alias  (cost=0.00..59282.31 rows=2 width=42)
(actual time=73.369..3330.281 rows=407 loops=1)
    Filter: ((name)::text ~~ '%FRANCISCO'::text)
Total runtime: 3330.524 ms
(3 rows)


this is a query that our system needs to do a LOT.   Is there any way
to improve the performance on this either with changes to our query
or by configuring the database deployment?   We have an index on
city_name but when using the % operator on the front of the query
string postgresql can't use the index .

Thanks for any help.

Mike