GoogleGuy - 5:26 pm on Dec 26, 2003 (gmt 0)

yankee, we've tested this a lot, and all our tests say it's an overall quality win for users. Very little in this world is perfect, so a few searches might get worse, but the large majority of searches get better. It took a while to find the right way to do this, so there were ways to do it that we tried that wouldn't have been a win or as much of a win; instead of deploying those, we went back to find a better way to do this. I agree that according to conventional informational retrieval wisdom, stemming would often be just a wash, but we've done some extra work.

IITian, name variants are not really stemming (e.g. coaching <-> coach), but more like synonyms. There may be some conservative amount of that going on right now, but not very much right now.

By the way, I'm traveling again over the next day or two, so I might not pop in as often for a while..