IOTower does not have a concept of "stopwords"

[Space Hobo]

Infobot perhaps overuses stopwords, stripping out articles and superlatives before triggering a factoid. This leads to problems like the 'saddest thing' factoid:

 <@SpaceHobo> Dumont: literal saddest thing
 <+Dumont> SpaceHobo: saddest thing =is= <reply>0 upgraded, 0 newly
  installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.|<reply>The Hurd has
  been abandoned, and work has begun on Hurd-ng. several
  papers are already available!|finding out that somebody
  blew away the factoid for saddest thing|<reply> Thursday
  night, his mother heard him saying "I'm not special" over and
  over.|Planet WebKit|robot still looking for kitten after you
  made God kill it.|<reply> GTK+ 2.x (The GIMP Tool
 <@SpaceHobo> Dumont: literal the saddest thing
 <+Dumont> SpaceHobo: the saddest thing =is= <reply>You need to add to
                'saddest thing'.

But in current IOTower, requests for "what is the saddest thing" and "what saddest thing?" would be separate factoids. In future we hope to have aliases for factoids, but some factoids should simply be in there without leading articles.

[Space Hobo (spacehobo)]

I've gone a small bit toward this by making the regexps for queries throw away a little bit between the words "what" and "is" so you can ask questions like "What in the name of R. Beef Kazanzakis is going on here?" and trigger the "going on here" factoid.

At this point, however, removal of articles may be worth putting in the key normalization function. I'd still like to see it done as a try-and-fall-back strategy though.