[logicallee]

It did - I had to use plus signs to force them to use them.

Normally it ignored those words. I am fairly certain of this detail. I must have found a list of those words - how else would I have found the string "from what it is to a"? I had a list of its stop words.

Edit: for proof, here's someone's screenshot of the same - http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2270/2201828252_45a32da7f4.jp...

As you can see, it is Google saying it is ignoring a word because it is too common. It has a list of every site that has that, but that list is huge and it doesn't usually use it.

[falsedan]

Stop words are words that are ignored when indexing, not when querying. Since you did find a result, those words must have been indexed.