I've searched this site and the internet in general and can't find any information which answers my question, so I thought I'd post it here. I have Full Text search operating on a database in SQL server 2008 and I have 2 questions relating to the index and stoplists:

  1. Do stoplist stopwords prevent the tokenised word from actually being inserted into the index or do they just filter results returned to queries?
  2. Can patterns be used in a stoplist to filter, for example, all numbers?

The reason I ask, is we have lots of documents with tables of numbers which we don't really want indexed or searched for but when I examine our FTS index, over half of the 4 million rows are numbers such as 1, 76.01, -0.1036886733 etc.

  • During index creation, the Full-Text Engine omits stopwords from the full-text index. -- technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms142551.aspx – Jon Seigel Jan 28 '14 at 17:55
  • As for the actual problem of omitting numbers, I have no idea. It may be necessary to move to a different fulltext indexing service. – Jon Seigel Jan 28 '14 at 17:56
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    Thanks for replying. If you can't use a regex pattern or something to prevent millions of numbers in an FTS index, it seems like an oversight. I'm sure others have the same issue. I'll maybe follow up with Microsoft. – John J Smith Jan 29 '14 at 11:36

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