What is the difference between a word not being indexed to search for and it fuzzy matching? Does this mean that the whole word won’t match, but word subset matches will still be returned, or does it mean something else?
And is that why the results were fewer in the first set, because the other articles did not contain the string “what” or “is” somewhere within the words of the content?Exactly that 🙂 Exceptions on the index table settings are applied during indexing. Whenever the plugin indexes a post, it extracts the keywords and if a keyword matches an exception it is removed and not indexed. This only happens for whole words, otherwise it would make a big mess. So words containing the exceptions are still indexed – ex.: “louis” contains “is”, it is still indexed
On the other hand the exceptions for the phrases works from the “other end”, so when the user types in “what is change management”, then the actual search phrase becomes “change management” – so “what” and “is” are not even considered, they are removed before search. Therefore a post containing the keyword “louis” wouldn’t match, while in the other case it potentially could.