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.