Trying to fix every single problem in the search module/layer/service is an anti-pattern by and of itself.
There's an anecdote[1] from early days of Google Search where a certain domain was ranking 1st for an unrelated query (i.e., a false positive). The managers refused to move ahead before that got fixed, but the bug/edge case proved a head scratcher for several weeks on end.
Lastly one of the engineers solved the problem - by buying the domain and taking it offline.
Point being, if you can fix the problem outside of the code domain, do just that.
[1] sadly can't seem to find it - mostly getting spam articles related to SEO
I'm pretty sure I've read a similar story in the book "I'm Feeling Lucky". It goes like this:
In the early days of Froogle, a shopping search engine made by Google, searching for "sneakers" always yielded a garden gnome wearing sneakers, one unit on sale, as the top result. This was considered bad, as someone searching for "sneakers" probably wanted to buy sneakers, not garden gnomes. The whole team tried to fix it, but they didn't want to just hardcode an exception. It eluded them for a while. Finally, it was not there anymore. They asked around for who had solved it, no one answered. Finally, one colleague arrived late - and placed the gnome on their desk.
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.
I live in Oregon and always search using OR. I'm so used to that being the abbreviation for Oregon that this is the first time it has occurred to me that it could be confused with boolean or!
There's a fantastic and subtle bug in the Google home hub and nest integration whereupon when the conditions are met, the nest integration can be seen in the pull-down menu's but voice integration doesn't work.
So, when one says "Hey Google, show me the front yard." Instead of showing the camera feed-- one gets information about a bar in LA called "The front yard".
One of my favorite sets of local search bugs involve interpreting "near me" as "near maine".