Synonyms feature allows relation between two query terms. By defining synonyms, you can control behavior of the alternate query entered by users and treat it as the desired query. When your site is searched globally, search queries will have effect of user’s country, user’s language, transliteration etc. , so its a beneficial to have this handy feature.
Ex. For a document “book”, people may use different words such as “booklet, copy, novel, print” etc.
Search analytics shows this trend and the user’s queries used to search. When you see that the search term is different than the expected query, then you can create synonyms. Query and its synonym query are no more related by their actual meaning. Synonyms are of two types – Unidirectional and Bidirectional.
Unidirectional synonyms are useful when users entered query is no more related to documents indexed.
Ex. people are searching for “digicam” and your index is not having any product matching this query but index contains camera products/documents, then you can set unidirectional synonym as
digicam -> camera
Bidirectional Synonyms are useful when users entered query also means something else and which is present in your index.
Ex. people are searching for “cell phone” and there are some products which are shown to the user. But the search query is parallel to “mobile” and there are many products in index with this. Here you can use bidirectional synonym to tell Expertrec that also bring results for “mobile”.
By enabling synonyms based on the search trend, you can help new users in finding expected documents.
