Finding your business information within Google Docs should be as easy as finding information on google.com. To meet that goal, over the next few days, we will be enabling new search features in Google Docs that provides better relevancy as well support for stemming and synonyms.
Sort by relevance. The first change is the addition of relevance ranking in Docs search results. Until now, when you searched for a document, spreadsheet, or presentation, results were sorted by "last modified" date.
Now, search in Google Docs will look at various "signals", including whether you've authored a document, whether they've been explicitly shared with you, and other factors to present the most relevant items at the top of your results list. This personalization improves search across shared files, and each user gets the results that are most relevant for them.
Adding to this personalized approach, we've also added a new menu on the right side of the toolbar to let you view, and fine-tune, your search results by "Relevance," "Starred," or "Last Modified" results.
Stemming and synonyms. Search in Google Docs now also includes automatic stemming and synonyms, so that your results are good even if your typing is off. If you search for "meeting note," results will include a few variations of those words, including "meeting notes" (which is what you probably meant to type).
Posted by Balazs Racz and Liviu Panait, Software Engineers, Google Apps Search
