Stop words - any added or removed to obtain better Knowledge search results?

[katherinejones]

I have come to realize that these words are in our stop list:

    break, broke, broken

    issue

    problem

    trouble

I can't say whether they are part of a set of stop word standards, or we added ourselves them some time ago.  

Unfortunately, a search of something like 'broken monitor' results in a very long list, with the article containing the instructions on who to contact for broken standard hardware (monitor, mouse, AC adapter etc) well beyond #5 in the result list.

I am contemplating removing some of these terms from the stop list for the Knowledge table (I understand I can do this per table).

Has anyone done this and seen the expected search result improvements? I hate to do this and go through a re-indexing only to find that it does not provide the desired result.

[servicenowkevin · Accepted solution]

We have done it and it really improved our results. When we started looking at the stop words we realized "import" and I think "email" were stop words, so we removed those a bunch of others. The search results improved pretty dramatically.