What is Stop Words?

Some search engines don't record extremely common words in order to save space or to speed up searches. These are known as "stop words?."

Some search engines store every word on a web page but they don't search for certain ones to save time. Consider a search for:

the piano player

The search engine has to make three runs to find matches (again, this is oversimplified).

First it looks for all matches of the, then all matches of piano, then all matches of player.

Chances are, just looking for the last two words is enough to find relevant pages. So to save time, the search engine excludes searching for a select number of small words. It won't "stop" to look for them.

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