The pragmatic level of language, which is concerned with how the external world impacts the meaning of communications, would come into play primarily at the query processing and understanding level. Some linguistic enhancements have finally reached commercially available search engines, but there is no standard use of terminology to describe their processes. As a result, what the various search engines are actually doing is often far from clear. Most use of linguistics is rudimentary. In general, the linguistic enhancements one now sees include Automatic truncation, mainly to enrich a query with both the plural and singular forms of a noun.
Some search engines are more clever and can add or subtract other forms of a word, mainly suffixes.
Automatic identification of proper nouns. This feature is becoming more common. The mechanism for doing this identification is simple recognition of upper case, rather than anything more linguistically motivated. Phrase identification . Some search engines have added phrase bracketers.