There are way too many stop words on Feedster.

There are waaaaaaaaaaaay too many stop words on Feedster. Wonder? 

> Done? Unfortunately? I could understand articles and some 

> prepositions, and perhaps forms of "to be" but anything else just 

> kills Feedster's usefulness to me. Here's why:

>

> I do lexical research for the dictionaries I write. Part of that 

> involves looking for examples of terms in the wild. This, by 

> necessity, depends upon exact phrase searching. I've resigned myself 

> to the fact that most search engines suck, that Google indexes only a 

> small fraction of weblogs, and that some words are destined to be stop 

> words. (The only full-text resource I know of which has no stop words 

> is Factiva.) Feedster and other blog indexers take care of some of 

> Google's shortcomings, I use a variety of search engines to make sure 

> I get a better sample of what can reasonably be called "the web" (as 

> opposed to non-web resources which have a web interface but are not 

> indexable or searchable except through their usually crappy interfaces).

>

> But because of Feedster's stop words, I also have to go to Blogdigger, 

> or PubSub, or Technorati. Each of these, like Feedster, come up short 

> in some way. If Feedster could cut the stop words to about 12, if it 

> would do real phrase searching every time (even if it means 

> wildcarding stop words, but otherwise retaining the phrase intact, if 

> it would actually allow me to see all pages of results, I might be 

> able to skip the other blog indexers.

>

> Thanks, in any case.

>

> Grant Barrett





Hi Grant,



Wow.  What an intelligent email.  Thank you.  I've taken the liberty of

forwarding it in full to our indexer guru and he and I will be

discussing it later today.



Scott