Getting Started with Synonyms

Introduction to synonyms

This guide will explain what synonyms are, but understanding how synonyms function within search is equally important. Below will explain everything you need to know about synonyms. Search configuration influences synonyms; you may need to speak to a power user of search within your team when troubleshooting synonyms.

Prerequisites

• You need to have permissions in Fredhopper's Merchandising Studio to create a synonym
• Fredhopper's Merchandising Studio is integrated successfully and search has been configured
• Basic understanding of Fredhopper Search including search index, passes, redirects and modified queries
• Access to onsite search reports and most frequent search queries within the onsite search
  • A good understanding of your customer's search behaviour will help you define which synonyms you need to put in place
  • Use good data regarding actual customer behaviour not assumed customer behaviour on your site
• Good understanding of your product catalogue data

Overview

Key information about this feature:

Synonyms are set up in the Fredhopper Merchandising Studio to help return relevant products when a shopper performs a search, without the merchandisers having to change all the product data in general. An example of this is where a search for "tv" has been executed, products containing "tv" and "television" should be returned.

Another example could be where 'women's underwear' is categorised as 'lingerie' within the product data, so when a customer searches for "women's underwear", they should be returned all lingerie products i.e. "women's underwear = lingerie". 

Therefore, synonyms can be defined as different words with identical or at least related meanings. 

Getting synonyms right will improve search recall and therefore lead to more purchases!

In the context of Fredhopper, the following types of operator synonyms exist:

The majority of good synonyms exist to take inconsistent product naming and referencing into account. They can help merchandisers to return both sets of products (e.g. tv and television) to customers without having to change all the product titles.

Types of synonyms

Multiple words can be connected with the same synonym operator within one synonym, e.g. tv is identical to television and tele, therefore, you could create "tv = television = tele" or "automobile, truck > car parts > wheel, seat cover". It is not possible to mix different operators within one synonym, e.g. "auto = automobile > car parts".

Synonyms of one definition can be separated by commas: pants > jeans, shorts, bermudas, 501. The words separated by a comma are not related to each other.

Each synonym stands for itself and is not transitive, e.g. if auto is similar to automatic and auto is similar to car, it does not mean that automatic is similar to car.

The following table shows how to translate common business cases into synonym syntax:

How search works, the basics

Synonyms work within the search functionality. You do not need to set up synonyms for every conceivable search query, as Fredhopper will follow the process below when a search is executed. Setting up synonyms will help guide shoppers to the most useful products when required. To understand synonyms, it is best to explain where they fit into the search process within Fredhopper.

Let's say a search query for a leading brand of "Red shoes by Chloé" is executed on a site. Fredhopper carries out the following:

1. Linguistic processing includes stemming & tokenizing
   • Stemming ensures that search has the purest form of the word or search phrase to match against
     • Forces lowercase = "red shoes by chloé"
     • Removes or transforms special characters = "red shoes by chloe"
     • Identifies words= "red","shoes","by","chloe"
     • Removed long words = "red","shoes","by","chloe"
     • Removes stop words (e.g. by, the, and, that, are, this, etc..) = "red","shoes",".","chloe"
     • Identifies root words = "red","shoe",".","chloe"
   • The number of words that result from stemming have been 'tokenized' 
2. Next Fredhopper looks to see if any synonyms are in place for this search query
3. Is there a redirect in place for this search query? If yes, then the shopper will be taken to the redirect. If no, the process continues:
4. The search query then goes through a pass and search indexing process
   • Search index is a body of structured data that search refers to when looking for results that are relevant to a specific search query. Indexes are a critical piece of search since they must be tailored to the specific information retrieval method of the search's algorithm.
5. Finally, the match rate, ranking rules, result modifications and facets are applied. Click for more information ranking rules and ranking cocktails.

The match rate will depend on the search pass. The match rate is calculated by adding the match rate of each of the terms in the query.

These checks result in the product lister page being displayed with the relevant products.

Things to remember

• Having two rules; "purple = violet" and, "violet = lavender" does not imply purple and lavender are the same
• Synonyms can combine multiple words
  • "purple, violet > lavender" reads purple and violet are generalisations of lavender, however, purple and violet are not the same
• Synonyms are not necessary for:
  • Singular/plural i.e. "dress = dresses"
  • Misspellings i.e "dresses = dreses"
  • Refinements i.e "shirts = dress shirts"
  • Special characters i.e. "big & tall = big tall"
  • Different word order i.e. "pants linen = linen pants"
  • Stop words i.e. "shirts for men = shirts men"
    • As these are dealt with via the linguistic analysers

Best practice

• Check your site or Preview if there are any products missing in a search result before setting up any synonyms
• Have good knowledge of your product data, which makes it easier to predict how a search will influence search results
• Have good knowledge of your shoppers search queries, what shoppers expect to find, and the products that are actually returned when a search is executed
• Don't create too many synonyms
• A good synonym can help bring the most relevant products to the top of a page, while an unnecessary synonym can give undeserved emphasis on less relevant results
• Check synonyms in Preview before publishing

Are you ready to create a synonym? Click here to open a step by step guide.

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