Snowball provides access to efficient algorithms for calculating a "stemmed" form of a word. this is a form with most of the common morphological endings removed; hopefully representing a common linguistic base form. this is most useful in building search engines and information retrieval software; for example, a search with stemming enabled should be able to find a document containing "cycling" given the query "cycles".

snowball provides algorithms for several (mainly european) languages. it also provides access to the classic porter stemming algorithm for english: although this has been superseded by an improved algorithm, the original algorithm may be of interest to information retrieval researchers wishing to reproduce results of earlier experiments.