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Stemming

Stemming is the ability to automatically search for different forms of a keyword. For example if the word "computers" is entered the search engine would also return pages containing computing, computed, computer, computation etc. Computer is the stem or root word.

Yahoo! and Google support stemming by default. Stemming can be enabled in old MSN Search through the advanced search page. Google introduced stemming around the time of the Florida update leading some pundits to suggest this was the cause of the major upheavals that some highly optimized commercial sites suffered. Google's stemming algorithm provides a wider choice of results where the keywords used are too restrictive. You will notice it most on 3 or more keyword searches.

Stemming means that it is no longer necessary to target different forms of a single word in optimizations. However the specific keywords will rank better than their stemmed variants.

Stemming

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