Google Goofin' -- Searching for "The"

It used to be a mantra. The sky is blue, the grass is green, and you can't search for "the" on Google because it's a stopword.

Well, Google's goofin' on me because now you can search for "the." I don't know when it started but it works. Do a plain search for the, no quotes. You'll get a result count of 3,690,000,000. What's the first result? THE ONION! Now, do a search for the the, no quotes, and you'll find that your results have magically shrunk to 13,700,000 and the first result is THE Journal Online: Technological Horizons in Education . (Interestingly, if you search for the ten times in a row you'll find you have 13,800,000 results, and I swear I don't really have this much free time.)

Now here's an interesting bit. You can't search for "the" outside of this query unless you're searching with quotes. So if you search for, without quotes, the last day of my life, you'll get the error message, "The following words are very common and were not included in your search: the of."Searching for the site:edu gives you a search error.

Searching for other traditionally-stopwords by themselves also worked, including of, a, and is.

Posted to Search Engines-Google