How advanced is Google synonym recognition?

[starydynamo]

Hi all.

I am currently helping a company that offers training courses and was wandering if Google would recognize 'Training' as a synonym of 'Course'  as effectively they both mean the same thing but seemed to be compounded?

So instead in my keywords/title etc.having.

Business Training Course

I could get away with only

Business Training OR Business Course.

In most cases the keyword difficulty for training is a 5% harder than course but as this is for a professional company and not a standard academic I felt training seemed more appropriate.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

'training' is definitely considered to be a synonym of 'course' (search for "~training") - just a matter of to what degree.

Run some queries in google and see how different they are. If you get the same results, they are exact synonyms. If the listings change, see how many of the same domains/pages are the same. That should give you a good idea whether they are considered close synonyms or not.