The thesaurus feature is very powerful, but poorly conceived entries can tax your application without providing additional utility.
To maximize the potential of this feature, keep the following suggestions in mind:
Do not create a multi-way thesaurus entry for a word with multiple meanings.
For example, khaki can refer to a color as well as to a style of pants. If you create a multi-way thesaurus entry for khaki = pants, then a user’s search for khaki towels could return irrelevant results for pants.
Do not create a multi-way thesaurus entry between a general and several more-specific terms, such as top = shirt = sweater = vest. This increases the number of results the user has to go through while reducing the overall accuracy of the items returned.
In this instance, better results are attained by creating individual one-way thesaurus entries between the general term top and each of the more-specific terms.
A thesaurus entry should never include a term that is a substring of another term in the entry. For example, consider a multi-way equivalency between "tackle" and "bait and tackle."
If users type "tackle," they get results for "tackle" or "bait and tackle" (that is, the same results they would have gotten for "tackle" without the thesaurus). If users type "bait and tackle," they get results for "bait and tackle" or "tackle," causing the "bait and" part of the query to be ignored.
Stop words such as "and" or "the" should not be used in single-word thesaurus forms.
For example, if "the" has been configured as a stop word, an equivalency between "thee" and "the" is not useful.
You can use stop words in multi-word thesaurus forms, because multi-word thesaurus forms are handled as phrases. In phrases, a stop word is treated as a literal word and not a stop word.
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 multi-way thesaurus entry "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 multi-way thesaurus entry Pikes Peak = Pike's Peak should only be used if apostrophe (‘) is enabled as a search character. To add a search character, contact an Oracle Commerce Developer Studio user at your site.
Avoid using thesaurus entries for common spelling corrections. The software fixes misspellings automatically.
