"in" is a Very Common Word

[jk3210]

In a search for [big widgets in fooville] Google throws up a note saying

"'in' is a very common word and was not included in your search"

So then if you search for [big widgets fooville] the results are slightly different --sometimes a different alignment of the same sites, sometimes a few sites added or removed from the top 10.

Why?

[tedster]

I think it's word proximity - with the word "in" in your search terms there's a space between widgets and fooville, even though the word "in" is a stop word.

Without the word "in" in your search terms, results that have "widgets fooville" directly next to each other in the document get a boost over those that have some intervening word.

[ALbino]

I had a similar experience to this last night when I was typing in "how to make widgets". It said "how to" were common and weren't included. Then I put in "make widgets" and got different results. Word proximity shouldn't affect that.

[jk3210]

>>Word proximity shouldn't affect that<<

I agree, but I think Tedster is correct in that it does seem to.

I'm trying to come to terms with one simple concept, and that is...

If a searcher types in "widgets in fooville," which page would be a better match --one titled "widgets in fooville," or one titled "widgets fooville," everything else being equal, of course.

It shouldn't make any difference, but it does seem to make at least a small difference.

[Robert Charlton]

This was discussed just about a month ago. Here's a good summation of what we observed....

Proximity is still an on-page factor, and carries weight -- but the so-called stopwords *are* being indexed, and they carry a small weight too, which comes into play when the margins between results are tight (as in "money" searches).

Google Says It Ignores Common Words, But...
... if so, why do the SERPs differ?
[webmasterworld.com...]