Mini:Stop words
A stop word is a word that is ignored when a page is indexed. For example, the word 'the' is very common. It would not help the search results if you indexed every instance of this word. It is unlikely that if someone uses the word 'the' in their search terms that actually paying attention to that word will increase the relevance of the search results returned.
Beyond the most common words (such as 'a', 'and', 'the'... etc) stop words may be different depending on the topical area being indexed or searched. For example - if a set of documents related to libraries are indexed, then the words 'library' and 'libraries' might be good candidates for stop words since ALL the documents in this topical area will likely include this word.
