SAN FRANCISCO  - Google says it is retooling its search machine to go beyond recognizing words in queries and begin understanding what it is people are asking for. The California-based Internet titan is intent on adding “semantic” capabilities to automatically comprehend meanings of phrases and questions to better fetch the online information being sought. “Right now, our understanding is pretty darn limited,” Google fellow and online search veteran Amit Singhal said of online search Thursday in a message posted at the company’s Google+ online social network. “Ask us for the 10 deepest lakes in the US and we’ll give you decent results based on those keywords, but not necessarily because we understand what depth is or what a lake is,” he explained.