I think some NLP is strictly beneficial for a search engine. You may think "grep for the web" sounds like a good idea, but let me tell you, having tried this, manually going through every permutation of plural forms of words and manually iterating the order of words to find a result is a chore and a half.
Basic NLP can do that a lot faster without introducing a lot of problems.
I do think Google currently goes way overboard with the NLP. It often feels like the query parser is an adversary you need to outsmart to get to the good results, rather than something that's actually helpful. That's not a great vibe. However, I think the big problem isn't what they are doing, but how little control you have over the process.
Like, instead of trying
Basic NLP can do that a lot faster without introducing a lot of problems.I do think Google currently goes way overboard with the NLP. It often feels like the query parser is an adversary you need to outsmart to get to the good results, rather than something that's actually helpful. That's not a great vibe. However, I think the big problem isn't what they are doing, but how little control you have over the process.