Understanding Text Search Properties

There are three properties you can define for a text search:

• Stop Words

  Stop words are words that are too common to search for. For example, if every service ticket uses the word "broken", you would not search on "broken". Similarly, if you only sold automobiles, searching sales receipts for the words "automobile" or "car" would be useless. Instead, you might search for specific makes and models of automobiles. By making "car" and "automobile" stop words, if you entered the search "1998 Ford Mustang Car", the system would only search for "1998 Ford Mustang", taking out the common word, "car". Stop words reduce the required file system storage for text search indexes and improve search performance.

• Synonyms

  Synonyms are words that mean the same thing. For example, in a motorcycle dealership, the words "bike", "chopper", and "hog" all refer to a motorcycle. Motorcycle is the thesaurus word, that is the word all the synonyms point to. "Bike", "chopper", and "hog" are the synonyms. When a user enters the search word "chopper", all records containing "motorcycle", and any of its synonyms are returned.

The text search engine has predefined common stop words and synonyms for each language supported. You only need to define those that are specific to your business.

You can define synonyms and stop words globally or for specific business view-data source pairs.