It seems like they've worked on mitigating this on the web with suggestions for alternate spellings and by displaying related searches. While you can see stemm

It seems like they've worked on mitigating this on the web with suggestions for alternate spellings and by displaying related searches. While you can see stemming at work in many Google searches, I'm pretty sure they don't build extensive substring indices on the web end either. For example, I've had searches where a substring returns 0 results and the exact phrase returns a handful.