Exceptions to Every Rule

Google ignores certain words (known as stop words) – but not all the time. In years past, lists of words that might be ignored were posted hither and yon as well as on this blog, but in September of 2009 Google tweaked the way they treat stop words and the ball game changed a little.

According to Google Help:

Exceptions to ‘Every word matters’

* Words that are commonly used, like ‘the,’ ‘a,’ and ‘for,’ are usually ignored (these are called stop words). But there are even exceptions to this exception. The search [ the who ] likely refers to the band; the query [ who ] probably refers to the World Health Organization — Google will not ignore the word ‘the’ in the first query.

* Synonyms might replace some words in your original query. (Adding + before a word disables synonyms.)

* A particular word might not appear on a page in your results if there is sufficient other evidence that the page is relevant. The evidence might come from language analysis that Google has done or many other sources. For example, the query [ overhead view of the bellagio pool ] will give you nice overhead pictures from pages that do not include the word ‘overhead.’

A little more information is revealed n this snippet from Google Guide:

To improve search performance, Google ignores (doesn’t index) common words called stop words (such as the, is, on, or, of, how, why, as well as certain single digits and single letters). Stop words are so common that they do little to narrow a search, and therefore they can safely be discarded. The indexer also ignores some punctuation and multiple spaces, as well as converting all letters to lowercase, to improve Google’s performance.

However, you can override this default:

To force Google to search for a particular term, put a + sign operator in front of the word in the query. Note that you should not put a space between the + and the word. So, to search for the satirical newspaper The Onion, use [ +The Onion ], not [ + The Onion ].

The + operator is typically used in front of stop words that Google would otherwise ignore or when you want Google to return only those pages that match your search terms exactly. However, the + operator can be used on any term.

Want to learn about Star Wars Episode One? “I” is a stop word and is not included in a search unless you precede it with a + sign.

* USE [ Star Wars +I ]

Knowing how to search properly can save loads of time in research, and also help you work out keyword phrases that aren’t as clunky, as you can use stop words to make the flow of your text more natural.

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