Full Text Search . . noise words

[MikeMCSD]

I'm passing a string into this stored procedure for
a Search using Full Text Search:

CREATE PROCEDURE SearchCatalog
(@Words varchar(50) = NULL)
AS
SELECT ProductID, Name, description
FROM Product
WHERE FREETEXT(*, @Words)

If the string just contains "the", or "4", or
other "noise words" an error is returned to my
VB ASP.NET program that says:
"A clause of the query contained only ignored words."

But if the string contains 2 words like "the medals",
it works, performing a search on "medals".

How can I handle this without filtering every phrase for
"the", etc . .
This one has me puzzled.

 

[VBrit]

in your query add some error handling. Then use the like operator to return results in the case that a query does only contain ignored words. That is the quickest way to get around this.

There are more complex ways, but then you get into the realms of building fully fledged search engines.

 

[MikeMCSD]

This is so stupid! How could Microsoft do this?

Right now I got it so I just pass words more than
two characters. But I still have a problem if I just
type "the", it crashes.

I'll have to see if I can play with the noise word file
and remove words, or check for them in code.