def remove_stop_words(input_str):
    """Removes stop words from query string"""
    remove_list = ['a', 'an', 'and', 'of', 'as', 'in', 'for', 'on', 'the', 'near', 'not', 'to', 'is']
    word_list = input_str.split()
    cleaned_str = ' '.join([i for i in word_list if i.lower() not in remove_list])
    return cleaned_str