Noise Words and the FREETEXT Predicate in SharePoint Search SQL Syntax

Applies to: SharePoint Server 2010

When you create search queries, remember that words that are very common or carry no meaning about the content are removed during indexing. These noise words cannot be matched in full-text searches. For example, searching for the phrase "it is a test" is equivalent to searching for the word "test" because "it", "is", and "a" are all discarded when the documents are indexed.

Noise words that are discarded from FREETEXT content search terms are ignored in the search. The search results and rankings are based on the list of search terms with the noise words removed.

For example, a user who wants to search for all documents that contain both "computer" and "software" might type "computer and software". If the string is inserted into the FREETEXT predicate unchanged, it would be submitted as:

FREETEXT('computer and software')

The search engine recognizes "and" as a noise word, and discards it. It then matches all documents that contain the terms "computer" and "software".

See Also

Reference

FREETEXT Predicate in SharePoint Search SQL Syntax