The presence of a stop word in a query reduces the minimum term count requirement for a document to match when MatchPartial mode is used. The example in this topic explains the interaction between stop words and MatchPartial mode.

The Oracle Commerce MDEX Engine treats stop words in a query as terms that match every document in the entire document set when counting how many terms must match a given query.

Therefore, the presence of a stop word in a query reduces the minimum term count requirement for a document to match by one, the presence of two stop words reduces it by two, and so on.

In practical terms, it means the result set may be both larger and more general than expected.

For example, consider a four-term query (such as Medical Society of America) against a search interface configured to enable MatchPartial modes to require three terms to match. If one of those four terms (in this case of) is a stop word, only two of the other terms have to match, meaning results such as Botanical Society of America or Medical Society Reunion would be included in the set.