Noise words can be disabled or enabled in SharePoint. These are words that add no meaning to the search (e.g. "the", "or", "a").

Stemming is where matches are also made on similar words based on the stem of the word. This works particularly well with verbs (e.g. the stem "fly" will bring up matches with "flying" and "flew"). Stemming is not enabled by default in SharePoint but this can be configured.

Soundex allows words with similar pronunciation to be grouped so that when you search for a word (e.g. "Mike"), then similar sounding results will be returned (e.g. "mic", "Michael", and "Michal"). Soundex is built into Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and works by ignoring the vowels and converting the remaining string into four-digit codes, which is then compared. Soundex is not built into SharePoint server, but by adding some simple...