Much better than Amazon used to have, definitely. Though I'm not so sure it's really as impressive as I first thought. It seems to heavily weigh the beginning

Much better than Amazon used to have, definitely. Though I'm not so sure it's really as impressive as I first thought. It seems to heavily weigh the beginning of the search text. Here's the same search you used, but with the beginning part moved to the end: http://ri.ms/vl7 http://ri.ms/vl7 We do a lot of this full-text search optimization at bug.gd-- we focus on parts of the text that are the rarest in the corpus/index and provide a higher weight to matches on those keywords (also factoring in phrase/proximity). I thought Amazon was doing something similar, but the change in moving around the words either means they have a maximum number of keywords they actually pass to their engine, or they're using a bias towards words at the front of the search (which is interesting itself).