On Fri, 8 May 1998, Brendan Jones wrote:

> Regarding ignoring stopwords, does swish++ tell you if it has ignored
> a search term, and if so, which ones?  I think that would be pretty
> important when giving the results of an AND search.

	No it doesn't.  Why should it?  The user can't do anything
	about it anyway.

	In the implementation, I don't bother to store stopwords in the
	index, so it can't teel the difference between a word that
	doesn't exist and a stopword that exists too many times.  I
	treat built-in stopwords exactly the same way.

	Search engines always return much more than what you want or not
	enough (because many can't do fuzzy matching).  I see this
	stopword issue as small potatoes.

> Otherwise when searching for "fee fie foe foo", documents containing "fee fie
> foo" but not the stopword "foe" will be returned - and people will think the
> search engine is faulty.  If swish++ says "#Ignored: foe" then there will
> be no misunderstanding.

	I've never seen Alta Vista do that.  People like Alta Vista just
	fine.  In practice, 99.9% of users won't even notice.

	- Paul J. Lucas
	  NASA Ames Research Center		Caelum Research Corporation
	  Moffett Field, California		San Jose, California
	  <pjl AT ptolemy DOT arc DOT nasa DOT gov>