Google’s changed its stopwords (words that are ignored as part of a search due to their ubiquity in language):
Well, Google’s pulled a fast one on us. The no longer counts, strictly speaking, as a stopword. Run a Google search on the. You’ll get about 2,550,000,000 results. In fact, you can search for stopword standbys like a and www and also get results, though none as dramatic as a search for the.