John Mueller answered a question about why a site that ranked for one keyword phrase didn’t rank for what they said was a synonym for the same phrase. John answered the question in general terms, ...

I started by Googling ‘funny pets’, and Google came up with a number of highly relevant results. I went ahead and then searched for ‘hilarious pets’ and Google came up with a different set of results.

In a post on the Official Google Blog, Google opens up the curtains a bit on how it handles synonyms in search queries and results. It’s a fairly detailed peek inside one aspect of Google’s search ...