SearchWP implements stopwords to increase both performance and relevance when providing search results. Stopwords are words that are common words that are likely used in the majority of the entries on your site. Because these words are so prevalent having them included in the index would decrease the relevancy of each individual entry. Further, the removal of stopwords reduces the overall size of the search index which results in faster searches.

There is a default list of Stopwords included with SearchWP which will be custom to the locale of your WordPress installation. Stopwords can be modified at any time based on your needs.

Suggestions

The default list of Stopwords is based on a commonly accepted list for the language of your website. SearchWP also provides Stopwords Suggestions that are based on the actual content of your website. The search index is analyzed and SearchWP will determine what words are used the most throughout your website:

If you do not see a button to view Suggestions, it means that your current Stopwords already contain the Suggested Stopwords, nice job!

You can evaluate the Suggested Stopwords and determine whether they should be added to the list of Stopwords. Having terms in your search index that are present on a significant portion of your entries can reduce the overall effectiveness of SearchWP’s algorithm. Periodically evaluating your Suggested Stopwords can have a big impact on the usefulness of your search results over time!

Note that when your list of Stopwords is edited and saved, you should click the Reset Index button to rebuild the index taking into consideration the edits made to the list of Stopwords.

Actions

Using the Actions button you can perform common tasks on your list of Stopwords:

Sort Alphabetically

If you have made a number of customizations to your Stopwords, sorting them alphabetically may help to manage them

Remove All

This will remove all of the Stopwords from the list

Restore Defaults

Restore the default list of Stopwords, this will overwrite your existing Stopwords