Miscellaneous Options

The Miscellaneous Options section enables you to enable or disable each of several optional Search & Preview features. The following options are available here:

• Open links in new window: Causes links in the result list to open their target pages in a new window.

• Remove duplicate search results: SharePoint installations often include the same document saved in several different locations, which can result in result lists in which the same document appears many times. Enable this feature to filter the list so that only the first found copy of a given document is listed. SharePoint identifies duplicates based on the actual content of each document.

• Allow Noise Word Queries: “Noise words” are words that are important for grammar or syntax, but which do not supply any meaning. These include many articles and prepositions. Usually, the search engine ignores these words when they appear in a query because, for example, a user searching for “The Beatles” probably does not want to find all pages that include the word “the”. However, if you wish to allow users to search for these words, then enable this option. Note also that some words, especially boolean operators such as “and”, “or” “not” and “near” are reserved for special handling; these do not count as noise words and furthermore cannot be searched for.

• Enable Stemming: The stemming feature enables Search & Preview to find documents that contain words that are grammatically related to the submitted search words so that, for example, a search for “puppy” will also find pages that include the word “puppies”. When enabled, the stemming feature will usually produce longer result lists, but can also help ensure that all relevant pages are included.

• Enable implicit wildcard: Enable this option to always search keywords with a trailing wildcard. This demands extra computing resources and can make rankings much less accurate, so we do not recommend this for general document or site searches. However, this option works well for people results because users will often be unsure how to spell a name and rankings are much less relevant.