# Slow query for high frequency terms

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/slow-query-for-high-frequency-terms/296528>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [February 7, 2022, 9:55pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/slow-query-for-high-frequency-terms/296528 "2022-02-07T21:55:12Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Brodin](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/brodin/32/101503_2.png) [@Brodin](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Brodin)\
**Post date:** [February 7, 2022, 9:55pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/slow-query-for-high-frequency-terms/296528/1 "2022-02-07T21:55:12Z")

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In a index with movie titles there area vast majority with the word “the” in them.

Doing a match query for said word leads to a very slow operation due to the expensive ranking that has to be done on a large part or the index.

My question is as follows: what can I do to optimize performance when users search for terms with a large amount of matches? Single characters, stop words or other common word?

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [March 7, 2022, 9:56pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/slow-query-for-high-frequency-terms/296528/2 "2022-03-07T21:56:04Z")

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