Synonym / Acronym question

[JohnJay981]

Hello

How would we configure the search for the following (example) scenario.

Searching for the word "John" would actually search for John123 and John789 and John211 etc.

I don't want to turn on substring searches and Steming is turned on but as these are english words then this doesn't work. I tried adding multiple synonyms mapping the words to the synonym John but it only used the first one for searching

thanks

[David]

From the Zoom User's Guide.

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.

[JohnJay981]

I have tried setting up synonyms. I created 3, the first with the Word John123 and the synonym of John. The second with the Word John789 and the synonym John and the first with the word John211 and the synonym John.

I re-indexed and did a search for John. It only returns matches against the first entry - John123.


thanks

[David]

You are doing it backwards.

Define just 1 Synonym.
John to equal John78, John123 & John211

[Ian S]

Hi,
can you support a format for synonym terms with mutliple words;

"Homecare Allowance"="HCA","Home Allowance","Home Subsidy"

Our synonym list is mostly made up of multiple words. The example is fictitious.

Thanks,
Ian

[Ray]

Unfortunately not at this point. Technically the definition of a "synonym" is a single word, and "phrases" (e.g. multiple words) are handled very differently in the internals of an index so this is not a simple issue.

You may want to use the Recommended Links feature to allow "Homecare Allowance" to return a particular page on the HCA, etc.

We may have to think of some improvement to handle acronyms in the future, but we have not had much request for it.

[Ian S]

Hmm,
what if we used underscore characters (or something similar) for the spaces and you made some provision for that on the back end? I'm just trying to think if we can trick the existing system behaviour.

Regards,
Ian

[Ray]

Underscores will allow it to be considered one word if you have underscores enabled for joining words (under "Configure"->"Indexing options"). If you then add some scripting (JS or otherwise) on the front-end to alter the user entered query before you pass it to Zoom, then you might be able to get what you want.

[Ian S]

Hi,
we'll give that a try. We've also created a predictive text function which can be bolted onto the front of any search form. It uses synonyms and other controlled lists and works well. So, we have plenty of options.

Many thanks,
Ian