Why don't some search terms produce any results?
Background: ContactsLaw's contact and file search uses SQL Server's full-text indexing features to provide a fast, efficient mechanism for matching text. Given a large repository of contact names, addresses, communication details, file numbers and matter descriptions, SQL Server will identify those terms which uniquely identify each record and add those to its index. Words which occur too frequently are discarded and will not return any results; these are termed noise words.
When searching for files and contacts, you may find that some search terms do not produce results, even though the word(s) are known to exist in records. In the vast majority of cases, this is due to the search term containing noise words.
Some tips for avoiding noise words include:
- Avoid words shorter than 3 characters long
- Avoid contractions and common abbreviations (e.g. "and", "or", "co", "ltd")
- Avoid exclusively using words known to occur frequently (e.g. "law", "will", "affidavit")
- Try surrounding a multiple-word search term in double-quotes to perform an exact match
It is also important to remember that the contact and file search is designed to locate a specific record, or a very limited subset. The number of search results is capped at 100. It is not designed for broad terms (e.g. "will of", "affidavit of") and should not be used to produce a long list of records - you can browse through a filtered list of contacts/files using other, more appropriate features in ContactsLaw.
At the time of writing, the following is a list of all noise words greater than or equal to 3 characters in length:
about, after, all, also, and, another, any, are, because, been, before, being, between, both, but, came, can, come, could, did, does, each, else, for, from, get, got, had, has, have, her, here, him, himself, his, how, into, its, just, like, make, many, might, more, most, much, must, never, now, only, other, our, out, over, said, same, see, should, since, some, still, such, take, than, that, the, their, them, then, there, these, they, this, those, through, too, under, use, very, want, was, way, well, were, what, when, where, which, while, who, will, with, would, you, your