What are stop words?

Posted on January 5th, 2007.

What are stop words? If you are used to search engine optimization, you will come across this term. Stop words are the words which are being ignored by search engines, in order to speed up searches and to save space.

How stop words help to save space?

Consider this sentence:

The way to the school is long and hard when walking in the rain.

The appears three times. To save space, a search engine might replace it with what’s called a marker. The sentence would be stored like this:

* way to * school is long and hard when walking in * rain.

This explanation is simplified, but the point is that using markers can save a lot of disk space. The sentence retains most of its relevancy, and the extra space can be used to store more web pages.

Explanation from Danny Sullivan

How can stop words speed searches?

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.
Explanation from Danny Sullivan

Search engines also ignore stop words in meta tags and title tags and domain names. Therefore, don’t put stop words on your meta and title tags because it will waste your bandwidth (but the effect is almost cannot be seen). Besides, the domains such as therealestate.com and arealestate.com will have the same effect because the stop words are there.

Below are some related links to widen your knowledge on this topic.

Stop words on Wikipedia
A list of English Stop Words
A list of stop words in English and other languages

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