Yeah semantic search, if solved, would address this problem.
That's really what I was getting at. Stripped right down, Google is still just viewing documents as a bag of words[1]. I mean, they have pagerank and they will apply more weight to words in headings, and they have 6-gram indexes and synonyms and all that clever stuff, but at it's core it's still lexically centered not semantically centered.
Meaning Google makes no effort to score your whole page against each word in the dictionary, it only attempts to score 1- to 6-game from the page and inbound links? That's unfortunate.
No. It means that for your comment, google will store each word, each pair of words, each triplet of words and so on up to 6 word long subsets. So if someone searched for 'Google makes no effort' then your comment will come up higher than a document which includes those words in a different order.
That's really what I was getting at. Stripped right down, Google is still just viewing documents as a bag of words[1]. I mean, they have pagerank and they will apply more weight to words in headings, and they have 6-gram indexes and synonyms and all that clever stuff, but at it's core it's still lexically centered not semantically centered.
[1] Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bag_of_words_model