I’ve just started learning about fulltext indexing and searching in MySQL and I’ve stumbled upon this list containing all of the “stop words” used in MySQL. I cannot understand what is tue purpose of these stop words, since this list contains a lot of actual words that I may want to search for, such as if I had a post on my blog titled “My first hello”, if I searched for any of these words I wouldn’t get the post since all of them are in the list. Can you please explain to me why these are what they are and what can I do in this situation because fulltext appears to be so useful but I find these stop words as such a bummer. I must be missing something.
The Stop Words are words which under most circumstances are noise to a full text search. Indexing them is pointless since they’re expected to occur so frequently that they will not help narrow down a result.
You do not have to use the default list, or any list at all if you don’t want to.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/796688/how-to-reset-stop-words-in-mysql has a couple of answers that will help you and links to the MySQL documentation.
The only caveat is that you have to restart and reindex after changing the list.