>> I can abide synonymous substitutions, for instance if I search for "interesting articles" and the results include "fascinating", "intriguing", etc. But it is

>> I can abide synonymous substitutions, for instance if I search for "interesting articles" and the results include "fascinating", "intriguing", etc. But it is boneheaded to serve up results that completely ignore one of or more search terms. > Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search. Requiring exact match for every term in a query would vastly reduce usability. He wasn't talking about that, and actually said he was fine with synonyms (and I would assume stemming, etc). His problem was Google flat-out ignoring some of his search terms, thus giving irrelevant results. I don't have examples handy, but I'm under the impression that Google often ignores some of the more relevant terms in my queries to give me more popular results. Which is ironic since most pre-Google search engines defaulted to OR'ing terms together, and one of Google's innovations was to switch to defaulting to AND. Now they seem to be revisiting the mistake of their competitors and wandering back to something like default-OR.