JunkMail - 7:20 pm on Aug 1, 2000 (gmt 0)

Being fairly new to the SEO world, I was pondering a thought:

Can Search Engines such as Altavista, Excite and Google match search keywords with synonyms? Like, if I did a search for puppies, would the S.E. also search for dogs, K-9's, etc. and turn up pages that may not even have 'puppies' in them, but synonyms or other related words?

Thanks for the time and help