How Do Other Search Engines Handle Stopwords?
Some search engines ignore stopwords in queries. There are two reasons why a search engine might ignore stopwords. If the engine requires all query terms to match, it may exclude a document because the stopword did not appear in the document. Even though the stopword is probably irrelevant to what the user is searching for, the document may have actually been a very good result. If the engine does not require all terms to match, then any document containing the stopword would be included in the results. Since stopwords are very common, this might be nearly every document in the engine’s index. Ignoring Stopwords Can Be a Problem For example, if a user searches for “vitamin a”, the letter “a” will be recognized as a stopword. If the search engine ignores it, then the results will include, and rank similarly, documents about “vitamin A” or “vitamin B” or “vitamin K.” Generally, words that have two meanings, one of which is a stopword and one of which is not, create this kind of problem.
