Google Even Pays Attention to Stop (Noise) Words

Interestingly, Google [UI consultant what is a] produces different results than [Google UI consultant what is it] , even though “it” and “a” are usually stop words:

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.

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I believe this is more advanced behavior than most search engines currently exhibit. Certainly when I was at LexisNexis there was no way on God’s green Earth that we were going to get the search engine folks to change the way the engine treated stop words.

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