[3] Hans Peter Luhn, one of the pioneers in information retrieval, is credited with coining the phrase and using the concept when introducing his Keyword-in-Context automatic indexing process.
In 1990, Christopher Fox proposed the first general stop list based on empirical word frequency information derived from the Brown Corpus:This paper reports an exercise in generating a stop list for general text based on the Brown corpus of 1,014,000 words drawn from a broad range of literature in English.
Other search engines remove some of the most common words—including lexical words, such as "want"—from a query in order to improve performance.
[7] In recent years the SEO best practices around stop words have evolved along with the fields of machine learning and natural language processing.
In February 2021, John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, Tweeted, "I wouldn't worry about stop words at all; write naturally.