Thursday, September 18, 2008

Stop Words

Stop Words


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.



Besides, omitting a few words also speeds up the search process. For instance, if a query

consists of three words. The Search Engine would generally make three runs for each of

the words and display the listings. However, if one of the words is such that omitting it

does not make a difference to search results, it can be excluded from the query and

consequently the search process becomes faster.



Some commonly excluded "stop words" are:

after

also

an

and

as

at

be

because

before

between



but

before

for

however

from

if

in

into

of

or

other

out

since

such

than

that

the

these

there

this

those

to

under



upon

when

where

whether

which

with

within

without

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