Maybe Bush's problem was just that he used Google.....

[qatarperegrine]

I was just trying to look up something about Iraq's nuclear program in the '80s, so I Googled Iraq nuclear history.

Try it.

I often appreciate that Google searches for variants on the words we input -- that if I search for tutor conference, for example, I also get webpages that talk about tutoring conferences. But someone really needs to tell them that Iraq and Iran are not synonyms!

Update, 30 January: woot, they fixed it!

Comments

[qatar.livejournal.com]

Is that how it does it, just by associating similar things that have been searched for together? I suppose the question here is whether this happened as a result of synonym matching or as a result of word stemming. I assumed it was stripping off the n and q as suffixes like it'd know to ignore the "ing" if I searched for "running." However, I guess if that were the case, ira nuclear history would turn up the same results, and it doesn't.

[roach2600.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing Leland is right - I know we used to do that for "did you know". I searched for "broiling salmon" one time and it asked me "did you mean grilling salmon?" I think we would do both stemming and related searches.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_tove/]

Sometimes this has other interesting results as well.