If Google uses stop words.how can it return a "quotes" query?

[sandpetra]

If Google uses stop words...how can it return a "quotes" query?

[tedster]

Google's use of stop words has certainly become more sophisticated -- see [webmasterworld.com...] from May 2005, for example. Except for our traditional usage of the term, I don't think the name "stop words" even applies very well. We sure don't get the warning messages today. I think the word "the" was the last to go, and that's been a while.

In quoted, exact phrase matching, it becomes obvious that no words are thrown out today. That's the power of a quarter million servers at work, I assume. How they do it is not something I could guess, but THAT they do it is clearly true, as you've noticed.

In regular, non-quoted searches, the traditional stop words are still not bolded in the search results, showing that these low-information character strings are still treated differently -- but I don't see it as a full stop any more. The semantic geniuses on the Google staff have clearly done something more evolved. Some natural phrases that include traditional stop words can result in urls with the full phrase showing on top, even though the search wasn't in quotes. That could be PR kicking in, it could be a "proximity" factor -- but I think it's probably more complex than that.