Brion L. VIBBER wrote:
Rather, if we're going to eliminate "useless" search terms, we should have a (per-language) list of such words.
A useful and simple (though not perfect) measure of uselessness is how many pages are returned for a given word. In English, 'a', 'an' and 'the' will appear in nearly every article. In Japanese, 'wa' and other similar marker words will appear in nearly every article.
The more articles that are returned for a given search term, the less informative it is.
--Jimbo