Google Revamps Their Stopwords

I know sometimes you lie awake at night and try to figure out Google's stopwords. You start with the, assuming it's a stopword, while your way to www and com, and eventually fall asleep trying to figure out if both 1 and one count. (For those of you who don't fall asleep figuring out stopwords, a "stopword" is a term that a search engine will not include in a query because it's too common.)

Well, Google's pulled a fast one on us. The no longer counts, strictly speaking, as a stopword. Run a Google search on the. You'll get about 2,550,000,000 results. In fact, you can search for stopword standbys like a and www and also get results, though none as dramatic as a search for the.

There's still some search weirdness, though. For example, a search for "the the" doesn't appear to work, so you can't search for the band. (Well, you can. You just make the second word a possessive -- "the the's" -- and you're in gravy.) Searching for the as part of a query --

the google stopword

-- gets the standard ""the" is a very common word and was not included in your search" message, though you can force Google to search for the by putting a + in front of it --

+the google stopword

-- works fine. This is going to take some more experimenting before I really understand it, I think.

Posted to Search Engines-Google