how did they do their search algorithm - help anyone with advice, I've got impossible requirements

My manager wants me to develop a search program, that would work like they
have it at edorado.com.
She made up her requirements after having compared how search works at
different websites, like eBay, Yahoo and others.
This is what she wants my program to be able to do:
(try this test at different websites just for fun).

At eBay:

- enter the word 'television' in a search field à you will get 2155 items.

- enter the word 'televisions' (in plural) à you will get only 60 items

- enter the word 'tv' à you will get 5147 items.

In other words - if entering different variations of the same word, you
will be getting different results .

My manager showed me one website (www.edorado.com ), where the above problem
didn't occur during her testing. When searched for 3 different forms of the
word 'tv' she was always getting the same results.

And another important thing: the result set came very precise - televisions,
not other things, speaking statistically - 'low noise', or in other words -
very low percentage of unrelated items.

Could anyone from those who work on development of search engines offer me
any advise on how I should approach to the design of my algorithm. I don't
have much experience in programming this kind of search, and my manager is a
real snake. According to her, if search engine brings hundreds of thousands
results, the user would not be able to browse through all of them, so what
she wants my program to do - is to bring less results, and only those that
are most relevant to the search term.

Could anyone help me with advise?

"vic" <vic (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.site-design:

My manager wants me to develop a search program, that would work like they
have it at edorado.com.

Please see http://smjg.port5.com/faqs/usenet/xpost.html for answers.

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