I apologize if this is taken up on a thread elsewhere, I did a search and couldn't find one.

I've heard that search engines rely on the terms queried by users to determine which results to put through their algorithms,

order, and return to the user -- however, rather than simply recognizing and retrieving exact matches for query terms, search

engines use their AI applied to natural language to construct intelligent matching for queries. An example might be a search

for Hotels that also returned results that did not contain that specific phrase, but instead had the terms Inn or Lodge.

Any thoughts as to what effect this has on keyword competition and how you should maximize sites for particular sets of

keywords?