Homophonic / Derivation matching?

Hey Bill, I mean William, Google seems to be getting smarter.

[seanpecor]

I'm assuming everyone and their mother has noticed this already but I haven't seen much on this so I'm here to spur on some discussion.

Lately I've noticed that Google is using what could be considered a blend of Derivation and Homophonic matching. I've only noticed this with names but it may be more widespread. For example, I searched for "Shawn Pecor", and found some pages that did not refer to that mispelling of my name, but did in fact refer to the correct version "Sean Pecor". So, out of curiousity, I searched for name and surname pairs of names that have common derivations (William / Bill, Jim / James and so on) and found more instances of inexact spellings of names that can be considered to have the same derivation appearing in search results.

Has anyone else noticed this sort of blending with other types of terms?

Sean.