I like the tilde tip, but I've noticed Google does this by default quite a bit (and seems to be more and more nowadays). I'm sure that explicitly giving the tilde activates more of the synonym checking, but I'm sure Google's goal is to eventually make it unnecessary to use any of these keywords.
You can turn on gmail-style hotkeys for Google search:
On the left side with the relatively new array of options I choose discussions and under I choose latest to find where people are talking about my industry (and what they are saying).
For some reason, it tickles me that on the left side where Google lists the various types of searches, it usually defaults to "Everything", but then under that there's a link labeled "more".