Words that sometimes contain dashes, sometimes not

[pjetson]

Hi, I'm a brand new Zoom user, and so far everything is fine. However, I've come across a "problem" during my testing, and I want to know if there's an easy way to solve it.

Basically, some of our products have names like IT-600. Unfortunately, people often leave out the dash, so they could call it (and therefore search for it as) an IT600 or an IT-600. Do I have to manually add synonyms for each product with a name like this, or is there an option somewhere that makes Zoom think they're the same word?

Thanks, Peter

[Ray]

If you click on "Configure"->"Indexing options" in the Indexer, there is a group of settings labelled as "Indexing word rules".

By unchecking "Hyphens" here, you will allow searches like "IT 600" and "IT-600" to match occurrences of both "IT-600" and "IT 600" (basically, it gets indexed as two words "IT" and "600"). This gets you closer to what you want to achieve.

However, that won't get it to match "IT600". There's no option to do this.

Yes, you can specify them as Synonyms. You can create a text file externally, containing the entire list of such names and import this in should that be easier. If you do use synonyms, you'd probably want to re-enable the "hyphen" for joining words.

Or you could simply add a bit of text before your search box to advise your users to search in the manner of "IT 600" or "IT-600" and not "IT600".

[Codecharmer]

I think this answers my question too, I can not index part number BR-48127-D4-M and then have the user search BR48127D4M and have this part come up. Eliminating the configuration setting for 'Indexing word rules' would result in too many invalid pages as BR AND 48127 AND ...

So...

Now the question is, If I am using CGI and want to automate a process for creating synonyms for all my dashed part numbers on the website; then import it. How large can that table be, what issues will I be facing speed, memory, etc.

Thanks.

[Ray]

There isn't a limit on the synonyms list as such. But it would affect the overall index in terms of maximum number of unique words indexed, etc.

If we're looking at just several thousand synonyms, it should be no problem. If we're talking about 100,000+ or millions, then yes, it would have an impact on speed and resources.