What are Stop words?

• A. Commonly used words for wild card searches.
• B. Words used to create regular expressions.
• C. Commonly used words that are ignored in searches.
• D. Commonly used words that cause the search to stop.

Answer: (C)

Stop words are commonly used words that a search system ignores during indexing and querying to improve performance and relevance. Because words like the, and, of, with appear so frequently, including them in every search would create a very large index and add little value in distinguishing documents. By skipping these terms, the search engine concentrates on the meaningful terms that actually differentiate contracts and clauses, making results faster and more focused. In DocuSign CLM, this means queries are processed by looking at the more informative words, which helps you find the right contracts or clauses without getting bogged down by everyday language. Some systems let you customize which words are treated as stop words or adjust behavior for phrases, recognizing that in some contexts certain small words can be important. For the other options, wild card searches rely on symbols like asterisks, not stop words; regular expressions are about pattern matching, not about excluding common terms; and stop words don’t cause the search to stop—they’re simply ignored to keep the search efficient.