Natural Language Mode

The default mode. MySQL ranks results by relevance, ignores stop words (the, is, a...), and words appearing in more than 50% of rows.

Example

SELECT title,
       MATCH(title, body)
       AGAINST('database optimization' IN NATURAL LANGUAGE MODE) AS relevance
FROM articles
WHERE MATCH(title, body)
      AGAINST('database optimization' IN NATURAL LANGUAGE MODE)
ORDER BY relevance DESC
LIMIT 10;

SQL

Full Editor

Pro Tip

Natural language mode automatically ignores common words — no manual stop word handling needed.

Related Resources

MySQL Reference

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MySQL How-To Guides

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MySQL Exercises

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