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Using Stopwords and Stoplists with Full-Text Search

Haroon Ashraf walks us through stoplists and stopwords in SQL Server Full-Text Search:

First, let’s clarify the essence of Stopwords and Stoplist. Then we’ll proceed to use them to improve Full-Text Search.

A Stoplist

A stoplist, as the name implies, is a list of stopwords. When associated with Full-Text Search, the Stoplist can filter out meaningless words or terms, thus improving search results.

A Stopword

A stopword is a word that has a minor role in Full-Text Search, despite being important grammatically. Therefore, a stopword is not essential from the Full-Text Search perspective.

According to Microsoft documentation, a stopword can be a word with some meaning in a specific language, or it may be some token with no linguistic value. In both cases, it is useless for the Full-Text Search.

Read on to see examples and how to build your own stoplists.