Reply To: Stop words not being excluded from search results?

[thebizpixie]

The difficulty I have is that the results are different for “what is change management”:
https://sacsconsult.com.au/?s=what+is+change+management&asp_active=1&p_asid=1&p_asp_data=1&filters_initial=1&filters_changed=0&qtranslate_lang=0&current_page_id=38557

versus just “change management”:
https://sacsconsult.com.au/?s=change+management&asp_active=1&p_asid=1&p_asp_data=1&filters_initial=1&filters_changed=0&qtranslate_lang=0&current_page_id=38557

If “what” and “is” were truly being ignored, I would have expected the results to be pretty much the same.

But the first set of results returns 14 articles, many of which are not about change.

Whereas the second set of results returns 51 articles, more of which are about change, at least in the initial rows of results.

Is it possible that by using the terms “what” and “is” in the search terms that certain articles are being excluded from the results?

The first set is not an exact subset of the second, but it does seem close.

I tried enabling exact match keyword logic as per your screenshot, but then the first search returned NO results, and the second 47.

I’m not keen to enforce exact matching just yet, as this may not be the best user experience, given the likely search terms I know my visitors will use. I’d rather figure out what’s going on here with the stop words if we can.

Would you mind having a look at the two above sets of search results and seeing if you can discern what might be going on?

I’m happy for you to have access to the back end if you want to better understand my settings.

Thank you.

Nikki