Define stop
A predecessor concept was used in creating some concordances. For example, the first Hebrew concordance, Meir nativ, contained a one-page list of unindexed words, with nonsubstantive prepositions and conjunctions which are similar to modern stop words.[3] Hans Peter Luhn, one of the pioneers in information retrieval, is credited with coining the phrase and using the concept when introducing his Keyword-in-Context automatic indexing process.[4] The phrase "stop word", which is not in Luhn's 1959 presentation, and the associated terms "stop list" and "stoplist" appear in the literature shortly afterward.[5] Although it is commonly assumed that stoplists include only the most frequent words in a language, it was C.J. Van Rijsbergen who proposed the first standardized list which was not based on word frequency information. The "Van list" included 250 English words. Martin Porter's word stemming program developed in the 1980s built on the Van list, and the Porter list is now commonly used as a default stoplist in a variety of software applications. In 1990, Christopher Fox proposed the first general stop list based on empirical word frequency information derived from the Brown Corpus:
In SEO terminology, stop words are the most common words that many search engines avoid, for the purposes of saving space and time in processing of large data during crawling or indexing. This helps search engines to save space in their databases.[7] For some search engines, these are some of the most common, short function words, such as the, is, at, which, and on. In this case, stop words can cause problems when searching for phrases that include them, particularly in names such as "The Who", "The The", or "Take That". Other search engines remove some of the most common wordsincluding lexical words, such as "want"from a query in order to improve performance.[8] |