"Today none of that is relevant. Today you need to provide semantic search ("SS") or your search will be considered broken because the results will truly suck."

"Today none of that is relevant. Today you need to provide semantic search ("SS") or your search will be considered broken because the results will truly suck." I agree semantic search is useful, but what you're proposing sounds vague, like black box magic. To provide semantic search, you still do the dirty things you just mentioned: integrate a stemming library, integrate synonyms and a huge corpus of 2+ words topics (ie. when someone searches for "big data", you should always return documents with those terms together, and never apart). You need those things. ML might help you generate them, but it isn't magically going to tell you X, Y and Z documents should also be returned for a query, even though it doesn't contain that term.