Google never had stop words. The original lexicon only included the most popular 14 million words (for fast bucketing), and rare words were processed specially.
It did - I had to use plus signs to force them to use them.
Normally it ignored those words. I am fairly certain of this detail. I must have found a list of those words - how else would I have found the string "from what it is to a"? I had a list of its stop words.
As you can see, it is Google saying it is ignoring a word because it is too common. It has a list of every site that has that, but that list is huge and it doesn't usually use it.
