When a site visitor enters individual search terms in a query, the automatic phrasing feature groups specified individual terms into a single search phrase and returns search results for the phrase.

Automatic phrasing is similar to placing a single set of quotation marks around multiple search terms before submitting the query. For example, “my search terms” is the phrased version of the query my search terms. Automatic phrasing removes the need for application users to place quotation marks around search phrases to get phrased results.

Automatic phrasing enables you to make searches more accurate and to eliminate irrelevant results. It does this by disabling features that increase the number of possible matches for the search term that the user enters. These features include thesaurus entries, stemming, and spelling correction.

For example, if automatic phrasing is enabled and a user enters "blue shoe" as search terms, MDEX looks for the phrase "blue shoe" in your phrase dictionary. If "blue shoe" exists in your phrase dictionary, the query will match only the exact phrase "blue shoe". It will not match thesaurus entries for "blue", "shoe", or "blue shoe", it will not perform stemming (matching "shoes", for example), and it will not perform spelling correction. It will not match the words in the phrase separately, or in any other order; that is, it will not match "shoe blue".

Automatic phrasing also eliminates cross-field matching. For example, if you use the phrase "dress shoes" as your search term, the query results will not include separate products that have "dress" and "shoes" in their individual description fields.

The "Did You Mean?" feature will remain enabled, however, enabling you to choose alternate search phrases if you have configured them. For example, if you have configured the phrase "blue suede shoes", you will be prompted to select or reject this alternate search term.

In Oracle Commerce Workbench, you can create, modify, and remove phrases. Open the Automatic Phrasing page from Search Tools on the application Home page. Site visitors are not affected by any phrases that you add or change until an administrator runs the promote_content script to promote content from the authoring to the live environment.