A lot of these entries are probably better handled with improved feedback than changed behavior. If you can tell whether the user meant 'either' or 'Oregon', that's great, but spending a week on the problem is a lot less urgent than just displaying "including results for Oregon".
Does Google have some kind of cultural allergy to special-casing or writing fallback rules around its recommendation systems? I ask because Chrome's spellcheck still lacks a lot of words that you can find in an abridged dictionary; it seems as though fallback rules like "the first hit needs at least one keyword match" or "never flag words found in Merriam-Webster as unknown" are basically never employed.
Does Google have some kind of cultural allergy to special-casing or writing fallback rules around its recommendation systems? I ask because Chrome's spellcheck still lacks a lot of words that you can find in an abridged dictionary; it seems as though fallback rules like "the first hit needs at least one keyword match" or "never flag words found in Merriam-Webster as unknown" are basically never employed.