Stopwords

Introduction

This page explains what stopwords are, how SearchBlox uses them, and how to customize them for your language.
Stopwords are common words that carry little or no meaning in a search query — words like "the", "and", "a", "is", and "on". Search engines like SearchBlox automatically skip these words during indexing and searching to keep results fast and relevant.
Why Stopwords Matter
SearchBlox excludes stopwords during indexing and search for three reasons:

• Save storage space — Common words appear millions of times across documents. Skipping them significantly reduces index size.
• Speed up search — Fewer words to process means faster search responses.
• Improve result relevance — Results are based on meaningful words, not filler words that appear in almost every document.

Example: If a user searches for "what is the best way to reset a password", SearchBlox ignores "what", "is", "the", "to", and "a" — and searches for "best way reset password" instead. This returns far more relevant results.
How SearchBlox Handles Stopwords
SearchBlox applies stopwords automatically based on the language you select when creating a collection. Each language has its own dedicated stopwords file stored at:
<SEARCHBLOX_INSTALLATION_PATH>\webapps\ROOT\stopwords
There is one file per language. For example, the English stopwords file is:
<SEARCHBLOX_INSTALLATION_PATH>\webapps\ROOT\stopwords\English_en.xml
You do not need to configure anything for stopwords to work — they are applied automatically when a collection is created with a selected language.
Customizing Stopwords
If the default stopwords for a language don't fit your organization's needs you can edit the stopwords file for that language.
Steps to Customize Stopwords

1. Navigate to the stopwords file for your language. For English:
   <SEARCHBLOX_INSTALLATION_PATH>\webapps\ROOT\stopwords\English_en.xml
2. Open the XML file in a text editor.
3. Add or remove words as needed and save the file.
4. Restart SearchBlox to load the updated stopwords file.
5. Clear and re-index the affected collection for the changes to take effect in search results.

🚧

Important Note:

Changes to the stopwords file will not be reflected in search results until the collection is fully cleared and re-indexed. Restarting SearchBlox alone is not enough — the re-index step is required.

Quick Reference