Thesaurus entry recommendations

Give single-word names to your entries, avoid non-searchable characters and stop words, and avoid creating entries which include substrings of other entries.

To avoid performance problems related to expensive or less than useful thesaurus search query expansions, follow these recommendations:

A thesaurus entry should never include a form that is a substring of another

Such forms rarely lead to useful expansions. For example, consider the following two entries:

ADAM AND EVE
EVE

If users type "EVE" they will get results for "EVE OR (ADAM AND EVE)"-the same results they would have gotten for "EVE" without the thesaurus. If the user types "ADAM AND EVE" they get results for (ADAM AND EVE) OR EVE, causing the "ADAM AND" part of the query to basically be ignored.

Stop words should not be used in thesaurus forms

For example, the following entries:

ANCESTORS AND ANCESTRY
HERITAGE
HEREDITY

should be replaced with either:

ANCESTORS
ANCESTRY
HERITAGE
HEREDITY

ANCESTORS ANCESTRY
HERITAGE
HEREDITY

The stop word "AND" should be removed.

Avoid multi-word thesaurus forms where single-word forms are appropriate

In particular, avoid multi-word forms that are not phrases that users are likely to type, or to which phrase expansion is likely to provide relevant additional results. For example, the following thesaurus entries:

AETHELSTAN, KING OF ENGLAND (D. 939)
ATHELSTAN, KING OF ENGLAND (D. 939)

should be replaced with the single-word form:

AETHELSTAN
ATHELSTAN

Thesaurus forms should not use non-searchable characters.

For example, the form:

PIKE'S PEAK

should only be used if apostrophe is enabled as a search character.