Synonyms

Sitecore Discover allows you to create semantic relationships between keywords or key phrases through the Customer Engagement Console (CEC). With one-way or two-way Discover synonyms, the keywords you type in the search bar can be related to other words, expanding the number of product results and keeping visitors engaged with the site.

You can define one-way synonyms in Discover to create relationships between hyponyms and taxonyms.

For example, feline is a general category containing the different cat types like lion and tiger. The word feline is the hyponym and the words lion and tiger are the taxonyms.

You can create true semantic word relationships by making keyword relationships at the word level using the following directional word equivalences:

Direction	Word equivalence description
One-way synonyms	One-way synonyms relate words that involve a whole and part of the whole. For example, a finger is a part of a hand. The word hand is the holonym of finger and finger is the meronym of hand.
Two-way synonyms	Two-way synonyms allow for bidirectional word equivalence for search terms. For example, a search for black pants is equivalent to a search for black trousers. Both key phrases yield the same results although the order of the results might not be the same.

Direction

Word equivalence description

One-way synonyms

One-way synonyms relate words that involve a whole and part of the whole.

For example, a finger is a part of a hand. The word hand is the holonym of finger and finger is the meronym of hand.

Two-way synonyms

Two-way synonyms allow for bidirectional word equivalence for search terms.

For example, a search for black pants is equivalent to a search for black trousers. Both key phrases yield the same results although the order of the results might not be the same.

With Discover synonyms, you define replacements as an additional type of word-level relationship. This method omits any results matching the keyword and returns results for the replacement keyword. For example, potential bad results returned for keyword chevy are hidden, and are corrected with those for the replacement word chevrolet.

You can create synonyms for a keyword in the CEC but they are not immediately available after publishing. Discover requires a new feed run and an indexing process to activate newly created synonym relationships.

Note

Data feed runs activate new synonym relationships. They are not available immediately after publishing.

Long search key phrase truncation

When search key phrases are long, Discover truncates them to just the first few words. This approach balances the following factors driving keyword searches:

Relevance provides the best results for each query.
Performance returns the search results fast.

Often, visitors copy and paste text from another source. That can result in long search keyphrases. Usually, the first few words in a key phrase represents their search intent. By truncating the keyphrase, Discover can expand the search and quickly show reasonable results to the user.

Note

Searches without key phrase truncation can take long to return any results adversely affecting visitor experience.