Microsoft’s Live Search product has rolled out two enhancements to try and better understand user input to return improved results: AutoSpell and Stemming. The AutoSpell feature recognizes common misspellings and returns them in the results, rather than the Google approach of asking you “did you mean McDonalds?” if you enter “MacDonalds” as your search term. Thus, Live Search saves you one page of further digging.
The second enhancement, stemming, looks at the root of the word rather than the exact word to try and include more relevant results. As an example, the Live Search team says a search for “half price book” will now include the same results as “half price books.” Meanwhile, you can still use quotes around your term for situations where an exact match is more appropriate.