Episode #19304834

Synonym matching or LSI or Semantic Topic Clustering or whatever people call it these days has a side effect I just noticed.

I sometimes do a search for people and narrow by city or state. When I do a search for Firstname Lastname Maryland, I get a lot of hits for physicians, most of whom do not live in Maryland :-)

BTW... Roger's article about how LSI has never been the right term to describe what Google does
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/latent-semantic-indexing-wont-help-seo/240705/

I have had similar experiences when searching for businesses in Newfoundland and Labrador .... abbreviation NL.

I get lots of .nl results from the Netherlands.

Meaning that, like me, even though you don't search using the abbreviation, Google decides to help you out and map Newfoundland and Labrador as a synonym for Netherlands?

Exactly.