Ensure Users Find What They Mean, Not Just What They Type
Stemming is a foundational technique in natural language processing (NLP) that transforms words to their root or base form. By stripping common prefixes and suffixes, stemming allows search systems to match different forms of a word to a single underlying concept.
"running," "runner," and "ran" could all reduce to the stem "run."
"connection," "connected," and "connecting" may all relate back to "connect."
“develop”, “developer”, “development”, and “developing” might all be reduced to the stem “develop.”
Search is about interpreting intent, not just matching words. When users enter a query, they rarely think about exact phrasing, tense, or grammatical form. Someone searching for "how to invest" might expect results that include investing, invested, investment, or investor. Without Stemming, those variations become roadblocks. With stemming, they become bridges.
Stemming improves recall by casting a wider net, especially for content-rich sites where language naturally varies between pieces of data. The result? A search experience that feels intuitive and intelligent. Users spend less time rephrasing queries and more time engaging with the results they came for. It’s one of the simplest, most powerful ways to ensure satisfaction in a search interface.
Looking for more info? View the docs.
In the Searchcraft universe, stemming is a high-performance feature that empowers pilots to deliver more intuitive, flexible, and cost-efficient search results, without compromising on speed or relevance.
Where many legacy search engines apply stemming at indexing time—baking it into the data permanently—Searchcraft flips the paradigm by applying stemming at the time of query. That distinction is mission-critical.
Legacy systems like Elasticsearch and OpenSearch typically rely on stemming during the indexing phase to reduce lookup costs later. The tradeoff? Slower indexing, more rigid content pipelines, and a brittle, preprocessed search index. With Searchcraft, that bottleneck disappears.
Because Searchcraft is 10–20x faster than traditional platforms and uses 60–70% less compute power, we can afford to run stemming dynamically at query time—and still deliver results in milliseconds. This architecture unlocks key advantages:
Searchcraft dynamically compares user queries to all relevant word forms—without bloating your index. This gives your search layer an intelligent boost, helping it understand intent in real time. It also means no guesswork about which word forms you need to pre-index.
By storing content in its original, unaltered form, Searchcraft keeps your ingestion pipeline fast and flexible. Updates are quick, content fidelity is preserved, and infrastructure costs stay low. No need to re-index every time your stemming rules change (if they even can in your current stack).
Searchcraft gives you just the right level of control. You can toggle stemming on or off per index using Vektron (our mission control UI) or via the Searchcraft API. There’s no fine-tuning or advanced configuration—because for most pilots, it just works. If stemming isn’t the right fit for a particular dataset, you can simply disable it. That’s it. No re-indexing. No drama.
Tip_
Stemming shines in content-rich applications where phrasing can vary widely:
In contrast, if you’re indexing precise terminology (like scientific formulas or brand names), you may want to disable stemming for full lexical accuracy.
Searchcraft’s query-time stemming is a leap forward in flexibility, performance, and developer control:
Delivers relevant matches without inflating your index
Speeds up content ingestion and reduces ops costs
Works on the fly—thanks to Searchcraft’s performance edge
Easy to toggle per index—no fine-tuning required
Looking for more info? View the docs.
Searchcraft makes implementing stemming a breeze. Here's how pilots can set it up:
Searchcraft makes it easy to manage Stemming through Vektron, our intuitive mission control dashboard. To enable Stemming, simply:
Navigate to an index
Select the primary language for the data
Toggle on Stemming
If you prefer direct API control, you can manage stemming settings as part of your index schema or query payloads using simple configuration flags.
Example_
Looking for more info? View the docs.
Chapter 3
While stemming can power up your search engine, it’s not without potential disadvantages. Here are key challenges to anticipate:
Domain Relevance
Whether stemming improves or degrades your search experience depends on your use case. For example:
Easy to Control, Important to Evaluate
The impact of Stemming can vary depending on how your users phrase queries. Use Vektron's analytics to observe search behavior and determine whether or not it improves relevance.
Language-Specific Nuances
Stemming varies greatly across languages. English stems are relatively simple ("running" ➔ "run"), but other languages (like German or Finnish) have highly inflected words where naive stemming can break meaning. Pilots should always validate stemming behavior for each supported language in their index.
The supported languages for stemming are different than for Stopwords as the concept of Stemming does not apply to all languages:
Tip_
Use Vektron's search analytics to monitor stemming performance—track "no result" queries and low-click terms that might hint at stemming issues.
Looking for more info? View the docs.
Chapter 4
Mastering Stemming
Stemming can transform your application’s search from a basic lookup tool into an intelligent, all-knowing assistant for your users. It’s the difference between making users search four times in different places versus guiding them to what they want with one query. Mastering this feature means you’re giving your users a superpower: the ability to explore everything your platform offers effortlessly. Here, let’s highlight what makes Searchcraft’s approach to Stemming particularly empowering, and how you can harness it to the fullest.
Stemming isn’t universally helpful—it depends on the type of content you're indexing and how your users search. In some cases, stemming boosts discoverability by connecting related word forms. In others, it can introduce noise by conflating distinctions that matter.
With the help of Vektron’s analytics, Pilots should evaluate Stemming in the context of their content, user expectations, and use case priorities.
Stemming rules vary widely between languages, and applying the wrong rules can reduce result quality or break relevance entirely. If your platform supports multiple languages, it's best to organize your content across language-specific indices. For example, English and French handle verb conjugation, pluralization, and compound words very differently. Segmenting your content allows each index to apply the correct stemming behavior for its language—ensuring smarter, more accurate matches for your users.
If you're running federated search—that is, querying multiple indices at once—the language and stemming settings must be the same across all those indices. Searchcraft won't attempt to resolve language mismatches or merge results with conflicting logic. Inconsistent settings can lead to unpredictable behavior or degraded search quality. For a consistent and reliable experience, make sure all federated indices share the same language configuration and stemming setting before liftoff.
Stemming in Searchcraft is available only when fuzzy matching is enabled. That’s because stemming operates as part of the fuzzy matching process, helping to expand query variants and catch alternate word forms. If you disable fuzzy matching, stemming won’t be applied—even if it’s enabled at the index level. This is an important consideration for teams that want full control over query behavior. If you need stemming, make sure fuzzy search is part of your search configuration.
Stemming isn’t a “set it and forget it” configuration. As your platform scales—adding more content, attracting new users, or expanding to new regions—your search behavior will evolve. Language shifts. Product catalogs grow. A search experience that worked well at 10,000 documents might start returning less relevant results at 1 million.
Looking for more info? View the docs.
Next Lesson
Searchcraft is looking for Beta Pilots to sign up for early access to the next generation of search.
Engineered for modern needs, Searchcraft enables businesses to implement robust, high-performance search functionality into any digital application within minutes. Ditch archaic, bloated earthbound systems like Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, and Algolia. Travel at light-speed to the next frontier in search tools with Searchcraft.