Is there a list of most common english words for indexing text for search?

Question

Is there a free available list of the most common english words to remove from text for creating a search index?

Answer 1

Wikipedia gives the 100 most frequent lemmas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English

That might be good for a start; the article provides some good references.

Answer 2

Here are the ones (plus characters) used in SQL Server 05 noiseword list, i assume the 08 stopwords are simular.

And the MSDN on it here

Hope this helps