Remove stop words during query transformation

Context and Problem Statement

When quering for a title of a paper, the title might contain stop words such as "a", "for", "and". Some data providers return 0 results when querying for a stop word. When transforming a query to the lucene syntax, the default Boolean operator and is used. When using IEEE, this often leads to zero search results.

Decision Drivers

• Consistent to the Google search engine
• Allow reproducible searches
• Avoid WTFs on the user's side

Considered Options

• Remove stop words from the query
• Automatically enclose in quotes if no Boolean operator is contained

Decision Outcome

Chosen option: "Remove stop words from the query", because comes out best.

Pros and Cons of the Options

Remove stop words from the query

• Good, because Good search results if no Boolean operators are used
• Bad, because When using complex queries and stop words are used alone, they are silently removed

Automatically enclose in quotes if no Boolean operator is contained

• Good, because Good search results if no Boolean operators are used
• Bad, because Silently leads to different results
• Bad, because Inconsistent to Google behavior