Stop Words

December 22, 2003 8:56 AM

The iTunes music store, like most search engines, ignores certain stop words -- words that are so common that they'll rarely be useful in a search. Now: how do you search for seminal 80's band The The?

(The answer, of course, is to search by song and then backtrack. But it's an interesting side-effect of what is otherwise a pretty sensible idea.)

2 Comments

Does iTunes understand using "The The" (with quotes) as a search term? That SHOULD be the way to deal with this problem. If it's not, then their search engine isn't being very friendly. (and you should write them a bug report saying that "every other modern search engine" does it).

Interesting side note - I just gave google a spin to see how it behaves. If your search includes ONLY stop words, it will stop ignoring them.

Ya, I have noticed this in google too. I bloged it at

http://www.senthoor.com/weblog/blogger.html

under the heading

"Does Google Really Drops the "common words"?"

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