What is a Stop Word?
A stop word is a word that is ignored by an algorithm such as a search engine because it's too common to be meaningful.
For example, "and," "is," "are," "but," "so," etc., can be found in almost every webpage and nobody would ever search for these words, so there isn't much point in keeping track of them.
Quotes
All stop words, for example, common words, such as a and the, are removed from multiple word queries to increase search performance.
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/wca/3.0.0?topic=search-stop-word-removal (accessed 2024-12-05)