Statements, also called full sentence queries, are grammatical sentences (including questions) or sentence fragments. The statements may include low-content terms such as articles (the), auxiliary verbs (would), or prepositions (of); these terms are also called noise words and are typically excluded from keyword queries, since they add little or no information to the query, and could exclude results that would otherwise relate to the content terms of the query. A search engine that handles this form of query typically uses one of three approaches:
Exclude low-content terms, which for this reason are also known as stop words. Since the low-content terms are ignored, they don’t impact the query results.
Require low-content terms, but weight them very low in terms of relevance. The terms are all required (a Boolean AND), but the effects of the low-content terms are diminished in terms of ranking the search results.
Treat all terms of the query as optional (a Boolean OR). Since the low-content terms are optional, they can’t exclude results, but will affect the results in terms of ranking.
ATG Search allows a combination of approaches. It provides a list of low-content terms, which can be either excluded from or assigned low weight in the query. This list can be edited through the Search Administration user interface. ATG Search does not require low-content (low-weighted) terms, but instead treats all terms of the query as optional. Thus, relevant results can not be excluded by a low-content term.
