# Are specific terms ignored from searches?

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/are-specific-terms-ignored-from-searches/106208>\
**Category:** Product Support\
**Created:** [January 10, 2019, 5:04pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/are-specific-terms-ignored-from-searches/106208 "2019-01-10T17:04:51Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1

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**Author:** ![RobMeade](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/robmeade/32/109119_2.png) [@RobMeade](https://meta.discourse.org/u/RobMeade)\
**Post date:** [January 10, 2019, 5:04pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/are-specific-terms-ignored-from-searches/106208/1 "2019-01-10T17:04:52Z")

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I’m having a few difficulties with the search functionality today.

We have an automated process we creates topics based on a lecture from a course, an example may be;

> About ‘Implementing Health & Damage’

I found myself wanting to reduces the maximum number of characters for a topic length and decide I’d do a quick search to see how many of our automated topics are quite long, to get a feel for the suitable max length.

If I search using the above, I’ll get result, but I need the search to be a little more _general_ than that, so I’ve tried searching for;

> About ’

…knowing that is the start of the format we always use. When I do, I don’t get any results, if I add another word after the apostrophe I do get results. I assumed at that point it was related to the apostrophe, but nope, if I search for just;

> About

I get no results, yet if I search for;

> Test

I do get results! This indicates there isn’t a limitation on the number of words as a minimum for a search, and we have a 3 character limit set for the term, so it isn’t that. The only thing I can think of is that there is a list of “words” that are being ignored from a search, yet I don’t think we’ve set these up.

Any information would be appreciated. 🙂

* * *

Update

I have also tested this with “because”, “and”, “the” and these all produce no results, so I’m feeling that there is a list of “common words” which are being ignored, but because I don’t have access to these via the settings I cannot alter them, and, cannot perform the search I want to perform.

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