Stop words

A stop word is a word or phrase that an IBM® Content Search Services search server ignores in a full-text search expression. Typically, to avoid many irrelevant search results, the stop words that you define are the words that occur frequently in the text language. You might also want product names or any other phrases that occur frequently in your object text to be stop words.

For example, if the is a stop word, the following search expressions are equivalent:

	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
	quick brown fox jumps over lazy dog

Stop word application exceptions

Stop words do not apply to some search expressions. In particular, the search terms that you enclose within quotation marks are treated as normal search terms as opposed to stop words. For example, no search terms are ignored in the following search expression for a proximity search: The quick brown fox~10. Also, a search term with any of the following attributes is treated as a normal search term:

Search term attribute	Search expression example for the search term the
All uppercase letters	`THE quick brown fox`
Includes the wildcard operator `*` or `?`	`the* quick brown fox`
Includes the optional term operator `?`	`?the quick brown fox`
Joined with other terms by the Boolean operators `AND`, `OR`, or `NOT`	`the AND fox`
In a search expression that has no terms other than stop words	`the`
In a search expression that contains a variation of a stop word. (In this example, dog is a stop word.)	`the lazy dogs`