| ... likely used in the document. | What words will authors likely to use for writing about this topic? If it's a scholarly topic, use scholarly words. If it's folksy, use slang. Also note that articles usually do not call themselves "articles". So the search statement "articles about the civil war" will likely retrieve pages containing the phrase "articles about the civil war" followed by a list of articles about the civil war. This may be great. But recognize that lots of articles about the civil war will be missed by this search. The best search statements usually simply state the topic in words likely to occur in the article. |
| .. as specific as possible. | The more words, the fewer hits, but to be effective additional words must focus the search toward more precise meanings.
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- Stop words is a jargon phrase referring to commonly used words that are not searched by a search engine. Examples of stop words are: a, an, the, and, of, where, do, how, etc., etc. Stop words are so common that they slowed down the response time. Many search engines, therefore, ignore stop words and only search main words, called "keywords". Ignoring stop words causes a problem when stop words are an essential part of a phrase. "Land of the free and the home of the brave" contains three words normally considered stop words: of, the, and. Ignoring these words could make searching this phrase difficult. Google does NOT ignore stops words and this makes searching phrases with stop words possible.
