Keyword (Internet search) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Keyword (Internet search)
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For other meanings of the word see keyword.

A keyword in an Internet search is one of the words used to find matching web pages. It was popularized during the early days of search engine development, as it was not possible to ask natural language questions and find the desired sites. Searches gave the best results if only a few keywords were chosen and searched for. These 'keywords' captured the essence of the topic in question and were likely to be present on all sites listed by the search engine.

Keywords are still used today. Many modern search engines have methods for determining which words in a search string are important and are ought to be treated as keywords. Common words like articles (a, an, the) and conjunctions (and, or, but) are not treated as keywords because it is inefficient to do so. Almost every English-language site on the Internet has the article 'the', and so it makes no sense to search for it."