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Configuring the Index to Ignore Stop Words in Queries

Note: With a Coveo Cloud Organization, you can configure stop words in the query pipeline (see Managing Query Pipeline Stop Words).

CES 7.0.4887+ (November 2012)

The Coveo Platform 7 indexes all terms contained in documents, including short very common words known as stop words (such as: a, the, a, at, by, for, in, it, of, to, the, this, that,…). Indexing these short words allows users to search and find exact occurrences of phrases (see Searching a Phrase).

However, sometimes considering short common words present in a query may dilute the important terms and reduce the relevance of the search results. You can configure CES to ignore a custom list of stop words at query time to improve search results relevance for natural language type of queries.

Example: A user enters the following natural language query:

How do I change my password in the intranet

The stop words (such as do, I, my, in, and the) may contribute to return search results not relevant to the main terms of the query (how, change, password, and intranet).

When you include these terms in a custom stop word list, the query sent to the index is: 

How change password intranet

The terms in the custom stop word list are considered except in the following cases:

  • Stop words within a phrase search (see Searching a Phrase).

  • A stop word is an argument of the NOT or NEAR operators (see Boolean Operators).

  • The query contains only stop words.

You must contact Coveo Support for instructions to get instructions to configure stop words to ignore in queries.

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