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Text searches for some small words or acronyms do not return the expected results - Support and Troubleshooting
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KB0683379

Text searches for some small words or acronyms do not return the expected results


2834 Views Last updated : Oct 5, 2022 public Copy Permalink
KB Summary by Now Assist

Issue

For the latest information, see https://docs.servicenow.com/csh?topicname=disable-stop-word-zing.html&version=latest

Text searches for small words or acronyms like asm, ats, ins etc.. do not return the expected results.

This message is displayed: Your text query contained only common words or ambiguous wildcards, please refine your search and try again 
Debug Text Search to see TSFalseQueryTerm

Cause

We consider some smaller words to be stemmed from stop words. For instance, we treat "ams" as "am" when we search for it because we are cutting off the trailing "s".

Check the stems of words using an online site that uses the same Porter stemming algorithm we do such as this one. 

https://s2.smu.edu/~fmoore/misc/porter_stemmer_example.html

Resolution

Follow the below steps to remove a stop word so the results are not blocked. 

WARNING: This can impact the performance of search and cause results for the stem so we do not recommend doing it.
  1. Navigate to System Definition > Text Index Stop Words and find the record for the stem and uncheck the active flag.
  2. Go through any table text indexes ( System Definition > Text Indexes ) which may contain the stem as a stop word. Start with the task, kb_knowledge, and sys_metadata as well as any others you expect to have the term in.
  3. If you find any records here, you can open them and set the Stop Mode to be Not a Stop Word.
  4. Lastly, you will probably need to regenerate the text index for any tables which you want to search for AMS because we would not have been indexing before since it was always a stop word.

Related Links

Documentation on how to regenerate the text index for a table.

Documentation on Zing matches derived words with stemming.


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