This article explores various text preprocessing techniques for the extraction of keywords and key phrases. It delves into methods such as text lemmatization, stop-word removal, and number removal, comparing their efficacy with unprocessed text in keyword extraction. Evaluation is based on the ability of keyword sets to retrieve relevant news articles from search engine queries. The study employs multiple keyword extraction tools for comprehensive analysis. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026.