Whats "a" the deal?

Does "a", "the", & "and" mean anything?

[1milehgh80210]

Apologize if this question is stupid/been answered before. :)

When searching google I type, for example-- buy widget
and-- buy a widget with no quotation marks
They returned different results, no problem except google states
"a is a very common word and was not included in your search. [details]" (so maybe it is?)
Also after creating an adwords ad, I noticed it would not appear unless I created seperate keyword strings with the "a" included.
I also occasionaly get different results by increasing # of spaces between words?...

[JonB]

i once wathced excellent movie groundhog day..and i think bill said: i am A god, not THE god! which is total difference. So if someone doesnt know that you must use +the and not just the then they get entirelly different god like they search for. i think real God is missing a lot of hits becasue google doesnt take "the" word by default . i dont think He likes that :)

[JonB]

1milehgh80210: i think this has something to do with this ,that yoour search keywords are at different possition in search query. if you search for "buy widgets" then buy is #1 and widgets is #2. ifyou search for "buy a widgets". then buy is #1,a is #2 and widgets is #3. But #2 is stripped so they search for 1 and 3 and "keep the distance" between words in query.(1 to 2 is smaller distance than 1 to 3)

i might be totally wrong, this i as far as i can rememebr from soem thread at the past.

[vitaplease]

Yes it has to do with proximity, whenever a stopword [webmasterworld.com] is used it returns results of pages which would also have "something" in between buy and widget.