either do a freeText search, which will in most cases prevent this error, or
remove is from your noise word list.

Hilary

Narayananst,
The word "is" is typically a "noise word" or sometimes referred to as a stop
word that is contained in a language-specific noise word file, as it is so
common in the English language that it provide no significant help in Full
Text Search. However, you can edit or removed from the language specific
noise.* file (noise = US_English) with notepad.exe.

These files are located under \FTDATA\SQLServer\Config\noise.* where *
represents the language - enu = US_English. You will need to stop the
MSSearch service, edit noise.enu (assuming US_English) with notepad.exe and
remove these letters and save the file, restart the MSSearch service and run
a Full Population on all of your FT Catalogs. I'd recommend that you remove
"is" and other noise words that you may want to search on, but not empty the
entire file or at least leave a single space in the file.

Regards,
John