Can you exclude words from search

Question

We have a Wiki site where we put most of our instructions / process. We are hopping to give people a way to find any instruction there.

However, we noticed that people will not search for keywords, but will ask question in the search bar such as : How do I share my Calendar. I believe that this negatively impact the search results.

I there a way to ignore the How do I from the search? I don't mean to not index that nor explicitly exclude it from the results, I mean to search like this isn't in the query.

Answer 1

You could try adding a query rule for the action term "how do I". The action term would be removed and only the remaining terms used in the query rule. The other alternative is to use RegEx.

Answer 2

You can update the search results webpart to exclude the word 'How do I' by

1. Go to the search results page
2. Edit the page
3. Edit the search result webparts
4. Click change query
5. Add (and -How do I) to exclude the keyword from the search see image below

Ref: https://www.mavention.nl/blog/exclude-external-users-search-results-office-365

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/f4fcde10-341b-4e76-8806-99ab74aa7114/removing-term-from-search-office-365-sharepoint-2013?forum=sharepointsearch