Keyword Stopwords

Overview

Stopwords are common words in a language (for example, "the," "a," "and," and "is") that are typically ignored during text analysis or keyword matching. These words carry little semantic meaning and do not meaningfully affect search intent.

Removing stopwords improves efficiency and accuracy in processes such as search engine indexing, text mining, and natural language processing (NLP), where meaningful terms drive analysis and matching.

Lightcast Stopwords Process

In keyword filtering, stopwords are ignored during explicit matching. Instead of requiring a stopword to appear in a specific position, any word may take its place to support flexible matching.

For example, searching for "Degree in history" may match:

• "Degree in history"
• "Degrees on history"
• "Degrees about history"

If a query contains only stopwords, no matches are returned.

Keyword matching is case-insensitive. As a result, searches such as "Portland, OR" or "System Administrator AND IT" may not return exactly what you expect, because “OR” and “IT” are treated as stopwords.

Note that, this behavior applies only to keyword filtering in the Job Posting APIs and Profile APIs.

Lightcast Stopword

The following words are treated as stopwords by Lightcast:

"a", "an", "and", "are", "as", "at", "be", "but", "by", "for", "if", "in", "into", "is", "it", "no", "not", "of", "on", "or", "such", "that", "the", "their", "then", "there", "these", "they", "this", "to", "was", "will", "with"