although I suspect they're being linguistically naive: do they really want a hit if someone queries on "lot"?
Not linguistically naive, just expecting interMedia to be a lot smarter than it apparently really is. :)
From all the PR about Context and then interMedia being intelligent searching tools, I would expect it to have enough knowledge about the language it's configured to use to recognize when a word fragment is so common as to be meaningless and ignore it.
Having to use % as a wildcard isn't intuitive to the average user, and even with an explanation right on the search page I don't think they would use it.
However, this being the OpenACS bboard makes this a bit off topic, so I'll end my "explain to me again what is so great about interMedia" rant here. :)
