What is a 'stop word' in Google?

looney_tunes

"Stop words is the name given to words which are filtered out prior to, or after, processing of natural language data (text)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_words In other words, they are ignored. The list to be ignored is set by the person setting up the search engine, so that the search concentrates on significant words rather than words that are 'just there'. For example, 'the', 'was', 'who', 'in' - they help make your query intelligible to you, but are not the key terms in a query such as "Who was the US president in 1943?". A search engine which ignores them will give you the same results if you simply enter "us president 1943". Some search engines do not use stop words, to make phrase matching easier. Jun 04 10, 6:47 PM