Google synonyms

Google is an integral part of our lives. Anything we need we search on Google. But have you ever notice that if there is a slight change in the wording of your search terms, it gives you different results? If you have not noticed it earlier, you can do it now.

Open Google.com, write "search engine optimisation", it will show that there are 35 million results, now just replace "s" with "z" i.e. "search engine optimization" there are 5.8 billion results.

In one of the Google's Blog post Helping computers understand Human Language, it says:

What is a synonym? An obvious example is that "pictures" and "photos" mean the same thing in most circumstances. If you search for [pictures developed with coffee] to see how to develop photographs using coffee grinds as a developing agent, Google must understand that even if a page says "photos" and not "pictures," it's still relevant to the search. While even a small child can identify synonyms like pictures/photos, getting a computer program to understand synonyms is enormously difficult, and we're very proud of the system we've developed at Google.

However, our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports. We took a set of these queries and analyzed how precise the synonyms were, and were happy with the results. For every 50 queries where synonyms significantly improved the search results, we had only one truly bad synonym.

In another blog post naming Understanding the web to make search more relevant, it says:
Answer highlighting helps you get to information more quickly by seeking out and bolding the likely answer to your question right in search results. The feature is meant for searches with factual answers, such as [meet john doe director], [john lennon died], or [what was the political party of president ford]. If the pages returned for these queries contain a simple answer, the search snippet will more often include the relevant text and bold it for easy reference.