Google partial matching?

My misspelled search returns partial matches...

[pixel_juice]

I just searched Google for 'download PC software'. Except my typing could do with some work, so I actually searched for 'ownload PC software'.

In the results, the highlighting looks like this:

Download the Microsoft

I think this has been dicussed before, but did anyone reach any conclusions about this? I have screenshot of the results page in question.

[pixel_juice]

OK, did some digging and answered my own question. Naturally, the highlighting Google uses is no indication of what the algorithm has been doing, it's just there to help me find the best result on the page.

Here's why I got the results I did - on the pages in question it appears that only the word 'download' is there, not 'ownload' at all.

However, looking in the source, it looks like Google is judging what is a complete word based on HTML tags. So a site with the following code:

<b>D</b><a href="#"><b>ownload</b></a>

...shows up for my search for ownload, although it appears in the cache and on the serps to be using the complete word 'download'. I'm not sure how far this extends. If the '2' words need to separated by an <A> tag then this shouldn't occur too often. If other tags also show this, then it could raise some intesting questions for people using messy WYSIWYG like frontpage, which often put in too many font tags etc.

[plasma]

It seems like it removes all tags and then looks for keywords.