stop words and proximity in title

... interesting observation

[4eyes]

Sorry if you guys already knew this, but its new to me.
I had thought Google would compeltely ignore a stop word in your search.

However, after a few seconds research, what appears to be happening is that it is taking it into account as a '2 letter stopword' placeholder..

In other words,

"accommodation in london"

gives the same SERP as

accommodation at london

and

accommodation to london

but different from:

accommodation london

Maybe its the proximity effect.

Anyone got a better researched angle on this?

[RBuzz]

I discovered a couple years ago that a stopword in a Google search will act as a full word wildcard. However, I'm not even sure Google's using stop words anymore. For example, you can now do a plain search for the word "the" or the word "of".

If you're interested in finding all possible iterations of a phrase, don't use a stop word. Instead use *; "three * mice" finds three blind mice, three green mice, etc. While the * cannot be used as a stem (you can't put it with a text string like moon*) you can use it as a full-word wildcard. Why does Google offer full-word wildcards and not stemming, like AltaVista does? No idea.

[gmoney]

4eyes,
There was some discussion and quick research about stop words here:
[webmasterworld.com...]
Basically the conclusion of the discussion is in agreement with what RBuz stated nicely, “stopword in a Google search will act as a full word wildcard”.

RBuz,
That is a nice tip about full-word wildcards *. I hadn’t seen that one before.