The STOPWORD_LIST parameter

Use the STOPWORD_LIST parameter to specify a list of words that you do not want indexed.

These stopwords are words that are irrelevant in a text search, such as and, by, or the. All words on this list are automatically eliminated from text searches, significantly improving performance.

If no stopword list is specified when you create an etx index, all words in a document are indexed. In this case, words such as the and an become as relevant in a search as words such as video and multimedia, and searches return more rows, many of which might not be useful. The etx index needs to be larger to include every word in a document, and thus searches are slower.

The stopword list must exist before you specify it as an index parameter. To create a stopword list, use the routine etx_CreateStopWlst() and pass it the name of an operating system file that contains a list of stopwords.

When you create a stopword list, you can use your own list of stopwords, or you can use the one provided by the OneDB® Excalibur Text Search DataBlade®module:

$INFORMIXDIR/extend/ETX.version/wordlist/etx_stopwords.txt

where version is the current version of the DataBlade module installed on your computer.