The stemmer deliberately changes the word you supply into something else. Stemmers you might see in action right now might produce something that looks like the original word, but the stem is an internal representation, for use by the computer only. When doing your programming you should imagine that the stemmer takes the word 'something' and turns it into '174JGS72'. You need to keep both strings of text: the original, as supplied by your program/user, and whatever your stemmer produces. They are not the same thing, and if you want them both you have to store them both.