Problem with simple full-text search on SQL Server 2005

Question

I just setup full-text search on my development database. I setup a new full-text index on a table and included 2 columns in the index. The first column is called 'description' and is a 'varchar(100)' and the other column is called 'notes' and is a 'text' column.

I am trying to perform a simple search like this:

select *
from myTable
where freetext(description, 'another')

I know for sure that there is at least one row where the 'description' column contains the word 'another' as the first word. However, the search produces 0 results. Searching for other words seems to work fine.

Also, when I setup my full-text index I told it to automatically update the index and to go ahead and build the index right away. The database hasn't changed at all since I did that.

Answer 1

SQL Server considers 'another' to be a stopword (noise word). So for all intents and purposes, it is ignored when performing a FULLTEXT search.

See C:\WINDOWS\system32\noise.eng (that is where it is installed on my system) for a full list of noise/stop words.