Google's overactive thesaurus

Google seems to be considering too many words as synonyms

[justbrowsing]

Has anybody else noticed an increase in Google's "appreciation" of synonyms lately? It's driving my Adwords campaign—and my negative keywords list—crazy. They seem a little too keen to assume that when I bid on one word, I'm also bidding on any other words that are either synonyms or just vaguely related. I'm not just talking about, say, different tenses of the same verb here. I'm talking about different words. Not all of which are even synonyms.

As a result, I've wasted money on quite a few clicks that I never asked for. These are cases where I've bid on a word which is a saleable service, and Google has fed my advert to somebody who's asked for a slightly different word, which has nothing to do with what I'm offering. It may be on topic, but it's not connected to what I sell.

I'm seeing it in search, as well. One example I've noticed is when searching for an author's bibliography. Instead, most of the results are biographies, with "biography" in bold. The serps are only slightly different for each term. Don't they realise there's a difference between "bibliography" and "biography"?

In search it's just an irritation—and one that limits the use of the service—but in AdWords this costs money.

Has anybody else had similar problems, or am I just being paranoid?

[handsome rob]

Welcome to the expanded broad match "feature"

[webmasterworld.com...]

AWA claimed he would be sharing our concerns with the AdWords team on Sept 27th/28th. So far, that's the last we've heard.