In building a search function for some of our internal documents in PHP
/ MySQL, I took a look at the default list of MySQL English language
stop words used in the natural language searching feature. The list is
actually quite extensive, and goes well beyond the typical list of "to
be" cognates, common prepositions, conjunctions, etc. It also includes a
large number of keywords that librarians or academic users might want to
search for. Here are a few examples:

available
appropriate
course
follow
former
novel

There are quite a number of other stop words that I think are suspect.
The full list of stop words is located here:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/fulltext-stopwords.html

I guess the point is that if you're building a library application that
takes advantage of MySQL's fulltext searching features, you might want
to customize you stop words list on your MySQL installation if you think
your library users might want to search the word "novel".

- David

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David Cloutman <[log in to unmask]>
Electronic Services Librarian
Marin County Free Library 

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