Stop words

The stop-words route allows you to add a list of words ignored in your search queries.

During a search, the stop words contained in your search query will be ignored by the sorting algorithm.

I.e. if the is in the stop-words list, and your search query contains the, MeiliSearch will ignore this word, and be faster to answer.

Adding a stop-words list improves the speed, and relevancy of a search.

Language driven

Stop words are strongly related to the language in which your data is written. Thus “the” or “of” are words that are very common in the English language and could be less relevant than a more specific word.

However, their recurrence in the data makes them decisive for calculating the relevance of a document, which could be counterproductive. In most cases, it is more desirable to ignore any recurrence of these words and to base research results on more relevant distinctions.