Quantcast

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.

[ad#in-post]

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.

Not Cuiler

Bzzt. Cuil fails on a variety of simple searches that pull up plenty of good results in google. Try, e.g., [BB-67 Montana], a hypothetical superbattleship that I wrote a book about. There are lots of pages about this ship, but Cuil claims it can’t find anything.

Even  worse … try [Cuil].  Google brings up two relevant hits, Cuil brings up zero.

Wired News – AP News

Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.

The end result is Cuil, pronounced “cool.” Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.