Stop words are common words like the, is, at, and which that search engines filter out to improve performance. But in SearchJet, you have full control over which words are treated as stop words and which are kept. This guide walks you through the configuration.
What Are Stop Words?
Stop words are extremely common words that search engines typically ignore during indexing and querying. Words like a, an, the, in, on, and is appear on almost every page, so including them in the search index adds noise without improving relevance. By filtering them out, search engines can focus on the words that actually carry meaning.
However, blindly filtering all common words can cause problems. A product named The North Face would lose a key identifier. A legal document referencing not guilty would miss critical context. That is why SearchJet gives you full control over the stop words list.
1. Stop Words Configuration
SearchJet ships with a default list of English stop words that covers most use cases. However, some sites need different behavior:
- E-commerce stores: Keep mini, pro, plus, and max as searchable terms. These are often part of product names. A customer searching for iPhone Pro Max should not lose the pro and max keywords.
- Legal or academic sites: Keep not, no, nor, and vs. These carry meaningful weight in formal content. Ignoring not in not liable completely changes the meaning.
- Multi-language sites: Add stop words from other languages to prevent noise in cross-language search results. Spanish el and French les behave differently in context.
- Technical documentation: Keep terms like or, and, and not. These are operators in code and technical queries. Filtering them would break searches for string or array and similar developer terms.
To access the stop words settings, go to SearchJet Dashboard, Settings, Index Configuration, Stop Words.
2. Management Procedure
Here is how to manage your stop words effectively:
Adding custom stop words: Type the word in the Add Stop Word field and click Add. The word will be excluded from search indexing on the next reindex. This is useful for words that are too common on your specific site, like shop on an e-commerce store where every product page contains it.
Removing default stop words: Click the X next to any word in the list to restore it as a searchable term. This is useful when a stop word is part of a brand name or product line. For example, removing the from the stop list if you have products like The Matrix or The Godfather.
Bulk operations: Upload a CSV file of stop words for large-scale changes, or export your current list for backup. This is especially helpful when migrating from another search solution that had its own stop words configuration.
3. Applying Changes
After modifying your stop words list, you need to reindex for changes to take effect. Go to SearchJet Dashboard, Index, Reindex and select the content types you want to update.
The reindex runs in the background and will not affect live search. Existing search results update automatically as new content is indexed. You can monitor progress in the dashboard. Typical reindex times are under 5 minutes for sites with up to 10,000 posts.
Tip: After making changes, use the Search Preview tool to test how your queries behave with the updated stop words list before going live. This lets you compare results with the old and new configurations side by side.
Getting the stop words right is one of the highest-impact, lowest-effort optimizations you can make for your site search. Spend 10 minutes reviewing your list, and you will see measurable improvements in search relevance and user satisfaction.