use standard synonyms or manually manage words?
A lot of blogposts start with a question to use one or another method to improve search quality. This post is like that: a lot of search engine (and alike) suppliers of corporate engines offer the feature of automated synonym usage to expand user search query’s. This seems very usefull since the contentsource doesn’t have to be expanded and a user still finds what he’s looking for…..is that true?
I believe not.
The dutch vocabulary consists of roughly 200.000 words. Offical synonym files contain up to synonyms for up to 80.000 words. These synonyms belong to the official dutch standard and that is exactly where the problem is. Since the engine is used in a corporate environment (internally or on a website) the context of content is limited while to synonym list is not.
A search query standard will be expanded with all known synonyms of every word in the query. This means all synonyms can trigger a search result and end up in surprising, unexpected and more importantly bad results. And because these list a so big it is unmanagable for a webmaster (or search optimiser).
Why not turn it around: in most cases about 250 terms in a single corporation are up for expand words, like synonyms. And in most cases these terms are so specific (productnames, branche related) that the language standard doesn’t have the correct synonym.
So how much work is it to manually add these terms to a vocabulary of the search product? Not that much…a single day probably is more than enough….think about it.
Tags: list, synonyms, vocabulary, words