In the “good old days,” Google was closer to a traditional information retrieval system: if you gave a query that was four unusual words, it would retrieve only documents that included all four words. Now, we are more aggressive at allowing synonyms and related terms; as you say, we assume the query is sensible and try to make sense of it, rather than doing a literal match to keywords. That is better formost users, but unfortunately not for poets like you.
— Peter Norvig (to Richard P. Gabriel)*