back | forward

Stop words are common words that are ignored by search engines at the time of searching a key phrase. This is done in order to save space on their server, and also to accelerate the search process.

When a search is conducted in a search engine, it will exclude the stop words from the search query, and will use the query by replacing all the stop words with a marker. A marker is a symbol that is substituted with the stop words. The intention is to save space. This way, the search engines are able to save more web pages in that extra space, as well as retain the relevancy of the search query.

Example: "jobs in USA" is a search query. The search engines will mark the stop word "in" with "*" and will conduct the search for "jobs * USA".

Let us consider a search query "the steel industry". In some search engines, all words will be stored, but they will exclude certain commonly used words from the search query. This is done in order to save time. Or else, they will have to make three different runs to find matches in this case. One run will be for "the", one will be for "steel" and the last will be for "industry". But there is a chance of getting the relevant pages by looking only for the last two words. Thereby an extra run, and also extra searching time for that run will be saved. So in order to save time, search engines ignore searching for some words.

Normally, search engines exclude "stop words", i.e. common words which only modify other words but carry no inherent meaning themselves, such as adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, or forms of "be". But, if a common word is essential in getting the result one wants, one can force a search engine (for example Google) to include a stop word in a query by using the inclusion operator ("+" sign). It is a must to use the operator for including each stop word in a query.

Another way to force some search engine include stop words into the search is to perform phrase search. For example, with Google you can include the phrase into double quotation marks, thus forcing the engine to display all words entered.

back | forward