Query Interpretation and Transformation

After MSSearch determines the word breaker, the search engine passes the query through the language-specific word breaker to determine each individual term. After breaking the words, the search engine passes the resulting words through a stemmer to generate language-specific inflected forms of each term. The search engine then crawls the index to find matches for the resultant group of words. The use of a word breaker and a stemmer enhances the effectiveness of a search query by generating more relevant alternatives to a user's search query.

Stemming is not used in the case of an exact phrase match. In this case, MSSearch breaks the words into multiple terms and then crawls the index.