does google now find parts of word?

i have evidence, word is even partly bold in snippet

[muesli]

i just searched for a friend, who happens to be called firstname widge. google on the 8th position displays a pdf document, which definitely does not contain the word widge. however it does widget.

better even: the SERP snippet displays widget in its context, writing widge bold: widget.

i can sticky you the real search terms if you want to see yourself.

[vitaplease]

Muesli,

are you sure its not Google's automatic spelling suggestion?

you can sticky me if you want.

[muesli]

yes i am sure :-)
i just sticked you the search string.

[vitaplease]

Mostly doing a "view source" and control find on that term will reveal the word. It can be that the html coding mixed things up?

[muesli]

i guess you mean google's html-version of the pdf. appearantly google's algo to represent the original formatting mixed up something, as is says <a>widge</a>t.

nevertheless strange. google's snippet source code says clearly <b>widge</b>t.

looks like a google bug in conjunction with their pdf treatment.

[tonyh01]

It seems that this is true. Does that mean that it makes sense to use plurals of words so that you catch both searches?

[ciml]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld.com, Tony.

I don't think that you would catch both searches; if the word matches widget then it presumably won't match widgets.

muesli, if the PDF links the widget part of the widgets word then it should be treated as <A href...>widget</A>s, and therefore widgets. I guess it's a PDF conversion bug.