Yes, in your account manager, you can set several categories of stopwords. Stopwords are the query terms that will be thrown out. Stopwords are commonly used to filter out noise words from a search, like "the" and "a". Noise words aren't usually a problem because most people know not to search these words anyway, and even if they do type them, then the search ranking will naturally demote noisy words. However, if you have certain common words on your site that people might often type, such as "hair" on a hair products store, then you could try adding these as stopwords to get overall fewer and more focussed search results.
There is an option to report the ignored stopwords to the user so they know what happened. And if you're worried about what the user will see if they only type a stopword, or type some important usage of a stopword, you can try the Direct Searches feature. A Direct Search rule can send a search directly to a certain page on a site for specified keywords, and the rule will match before stopwords are removed from the search.
So for example if you have a hair care site, then "hair" might such a common word that it tends to flood the search results. To better focus searches, one option might be to make "hair" a stopword (other options include defaulting to ALL words searches, or searching just the meta descriptions, see FAQ for more ideas). If you then still have a few searches that you want to catch with the word hair, such as "hair" by itself and "hair today" (say it's the name of a product), Direct Searches can be set to trigger before the stopword is removed. You can cover all your bases this way.
Your users can even be encouraged to type questions in whole sentences if you set good stopwords, because then only the most important words get searched. For example, just by setting the common stopword presets that we provide, querying "What is a carburetor?" will search for "carburetor", and "Tell me about the history of the presidency" will search for just "history" and "presidency". Remember, this is a presentation trick and not real natural language parsing, so don't mislead your visitors into thinking that you really understand what they're saying! But within reason, this stopword setting technique can be used to simulate an FAQ querying system. You will want to experiment to see how pages are returning for common questions, and you may be interested in the following FAQ as well: How can I influence the outcome of a search?
There are three cases in which stopwords will remain visible: (1) The concordance (sentence excerpts) will still include all stopwords for readability, (2) Queries in quotes (phrases) will still be searched for all words, and (3) the stopword reporting option will tell the user which words have been ignored in the search.
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