Yahoo! Now Searches Stop Words in Phrases

I don't know how recently this changed, but Yahoo! used to not search the stop words within a phrase search. In other words, searching for "difference in principle" would find matches with "difference of principle." While this is a good thing for phrase searching, it breaks several neat tricks you could do with Yahoo! In particular, the Yahoo! hack to get it to search for a wildcard word within a phrase search no longer works. This also breaks Tara's YNAPS -- Yahoo Non-API Proximity Search.

Google went through this same process a few years ago. However, they began allowing the use of an asterisk * to be a wildcard word in a phrase when they started searching stop words in a phrase. I would love to see Yahoo! do the same (and for that matter allow the * to function as a regular truncation symbol)! Until that happens, for proximity searching, we now only have Exalead with its NEAR operator and the unofficial GAPS. Yahoo! Search review updated.