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I just ran across 37Signals’ ”37Better Project”, in which they suggest interface and functional improvements for various sites.

Among the sites they list as needing improvement is [37BetterGoogle][Google], in which they suggest that Google could improve their results by “provid[ing] a way to search for slight variations of your initial query”. This is a silly suggestion because Google already does word-stemming:

As you can see from the above screenshot, I searched for latvia mailer (train* short sleep). It returned results with the words “Latvian” and “sleepy” in it. Clearly these are variants of the search words, which is exactly what 37Signals suggests is missing. True, Google doesn’t list the variants as 37Google suggests they do, but I think that would add noise to the results and not provide anything really useful.

So, keep up the good work, guys, but please realize that you’re not the only people making the magic candy.