Synonyms

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This feature allows you to specify synonyms, 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.

Note: 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.

 
You can also Import and Export your list of synonyms to and from a text file. This should be a text file containing a synonym entry per line, in the form of:

word=synonym1,synonym2,synonym3, etc...

 
You can create this text file in any text editor (such as Notepad). An example text file which can be imported into the Synonyms list would be as follows:

question=inquiry,enquiry,query
problem=trouble,issue,bug,help
rat=mouse,mice
dog=puppies,puppy,canine,dawg

 

Note that you can only have single word synonyms, and not synonyms for phrases.

Zoom will expect this text file to be in the same encoding or charset as specified on the "Languages" panel. So if "Unicode (UTF-8)" is selected here, the file would be expected to be in UTF-8 encoding. Only the encodings available on the Languages panel are supported.