Creative use of synonyms or recommended links?

[xdew12981]

I have searched in the forum about using synonyms and related links to get around the no-use policy of phrases in the synonyms feature (in most cases to find acronyms in files), but haven't found one that will resolve my questions completely. Can someone please reply if what I am requesting below is remotely possible in the SW or not? There have been some creative ideas for others using acronyms, but I am wondering if there is a creative solution for my problems too. Thanks in advance!

1. Our company had a system that we leveraged to create a new type of model, and although many of the components are the same the marketing team decided to change the names of some of the subsystems. So, something that might have been Primary Metering before is now called MicroSlide Metering in our HTML files. I would like the "old" customers to know the new terminology, and be able to search on those words if that is what they are used to using, but all of those instances include spaces so I can't set them up as synonyms. What can I do to allow that association?

2. Also, we use the acronym of LIS for Laboratory Information System, which also means laboratory computer, which all have spaces. In the acronym case I should probably use a recommended link (correct?), but a search on "LIS" to mean Laboratory computer can't be shortened to just Laboratory, or computer because those terms are too widely used in our documents. What should I do?

I guess I am not totally familiar with how recommended links work. Do they allow me to set up a connection between, for example, reference range = normal range and expected values? I get confused how I can make these multiple phrase matches work in the search. We have many phrases I would like to set up as synonyms, but don't know how.

thanks! sorry this was so long! P.S. We HAVE to use the Javascript output, for a CD search.

[MergeThis]

Synonyms are simply bad-word = actual-word; that is, if the user types "baggige" or "bagage," Zoom will include pages with "baggage" in them.

Recommended links, on the other hand are word-or-phrase = one-or-more-pages-every-time; that is, if the user types "baggage folder," Zoom will always present the same pages in the Recommended Links section, in addition to all other pages that match the search words.


Good luck,
Leon

[JG867]

Try this?

Hi,

Have you thought about listing your synonyms as Zoom keywords (or Zoomwords) in the html file? Would this work? Then if someone were to search for Primary Metering, a search result would return files related to Microslide Metering? Zoomwords are added in the meta-tag of your header.

I'm not too sure if that would work, but its the first thing that came to mind......

good luck!

[xdew12981]

I should have mentioned that we manage thousands of HTML files (written in XML), and to include this information in meta tags would be very time-consuming for us.

I did think of that, but it would just be a lot of effort. A really good response, though.

Same goes for the first response. Since we manage so many pages with these words in them, for me to make those phrases recommended links, I would have to hard code MANY pages to come up as recommended link results - it is hard to capture all the possible pages. It seems like there's gotta be a better way since we are indexing so many files.

On another note, does anyone know if the synonyms only work one direction? So if I wanted microwell = well, would that in turn also act as well = microwell? Or would I need two separate entries?

thanks for the help.

[David]

Javascript is the least powerful search script option (but the easiest to initially install). It is slow and doesn't support exact phrase. There are other options for CD search that might be better.

Synonyms allows you to specify variations of words, common misspellings, etc. and allow you to map them to an equivalent word in the index. This can be very helpful if many users on your site are searching for names which are different to the ones you used on your website, but have the same meaning.

For example, the word “question” could be made equivalent to “inquiry,enquiry,query,questions”, so that when a user searches for any of the aforementioned words, they would get the same results.

A synonym definition has two fields:

1.Word: This is the word that the synonyms will be mapped to. It must be a word that actually appears in the content of your website.

2.Synonyms: This is a list of words separated by commas that will be considered equivalent to the indexed word. When a user searches for any of these words, they will get the same search results as if they searched for the indexed word. All occurrences of the words in this synonym list will also appear as a search result when you search for the indexed word.

You will need to re-index your website for any new synonyms to take effect.

When a word is synonymous with another word, it is implied that they are equivalent both ways. For example, if an entry for “cat” has a synonym “feline”, then “feline” is also considered the same as “cat”. You do not need to specify another synonym entry to define this.

Due to limitations in the index struture we don't support phrases as synonyms.

Recommended links will match against the full search query, so a search for 'text box' (ie. without quotation marks) will also return the recommended links entered for the word/phrase: text box. Note that some characters (such as brackets and other punctuation characters) and spaces may be stripped or trimmed from your keyword or phrase. This is so that the phrase will match the search query (which will also have such characters stripped or trimmed).

Example,
Word: help file
URL: http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/usersguide.html
Title: Users Guide
Description: Comprehensive users guide to Zoom

The above recommended link will appear for a search query containing the exact phrase "help file", but it will not return in a search for the single word help. It will however, also return for the two word search query help file (ie. without quotation marks).

...it is hard to capture all the possible pages [to add new keywords].

With some experimentation I am sure you could search the files for the phrase in question (using window search for example), get the document subset with that phrase, move them to a sub folder, then use a good text editor, like UltraEdit, to add keywords in the file subset. Then move them back to their initial location. It would be maybe 15min work, even for 1000's of documents.

[xdew12981]

Thanks for the responses.

Unfortunately, we have to use the JavaScript CD option because of the limitations on our system (it is on-board a QNX-based system with a web server).

I will try some of these as related links.