Having a list of stopwords is different from discarding half the query. Yes, most search engines have ignored commonly-used words since at least the late 90s.

Having a list of stopwords is different from discarding half the query. Yes, most search engines have ignored commonly-used words since at least the late 90s. But Google only started doing its idiotic "Missing: [key word from your search]" fairly recently. And it's a step back. Although I personally don't think this is the case, it's something that's going to provide ammunition to the conspiracy theorists who'll swear they're just doing it to drive clicks to pages with Google ads.