Question

I'm currently coding a little search engine and reached a point where I have a problem. To save space my spider has a list of "useless words" like "to, not, on, in, at, be, or, ...". But what, if a user searches for the famous quote "to be or not to be". It consists only of "useless words" and my search engine will give back ZERO results. Any ideas how to fix that?

Answer 1

make exception for to be or not to be :D

Answer 2

You could check whether more than two or three of your defined useless words are next to each other, and if they are, execute the search query verbatim. That could catch other similar cases as well.