For true long tail queries it seems to me that often (speaking only as a Google user, not an expert) the NLP really ends up getting in the way by causing the qu

For true long tail queries it seems to me that often (speaking only as a Google user, not an expert) the NLP really ends up getting in the way by causing the query to be reinterpreted as something more mainstream. But I agree that it's important for getting high quality results for a lot of common queries. And that quality and relevance scoring of results is also a hard problem.