Stopwords in Keyword Search

Definition

Stopwords are common words in a language, like "the," "a," "and," and "is," that are often filtered out of text during analysis or search. They don't carry much semantic meaning and can take up space and processing time. Removing stopwords can improve the efficiency and accuracy of tasks like search engine indexing, text mining, and natural language processing.

Lightcast Stopwords Process

For Lightcast, all stopwords are ignored from explicit matches. Instead, they will allow for any word to take their place in order to facilitate a match. For instance, searching for "Degree in history" will match “Degree in history”, “Degrees on history”, “Degrees about history”, etc. Searching for only stop words will not produce any matches. It's important to note that queries are case insensitive, so searches such as "Portland, OR" and "System Administrator" AND IT may not return exactly what you would expect, since “OR” and “IT” are both stop words.

Please note that this only applies to keyword filtering in our Job Posting and Profile APIs.

Lightcast Stopwords

"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"