Hyphenated words in search results

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sds
Propeller Head
Posts: 48
Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2018 11:29 am
Location: Tucson

Hyphenated words in search results

Post by sds »

I feel like I've exhausted my ideas. I tried synonyms but that doesn't seem to work. I've tried the handful of options in the Glossary, which we heavily use for searching in the HTML output. So I come to you guys.

We have several words that can be hyphenated or not depending on who's typing. As a company, we've settled on the formal grammatical structure for each one, but that doesn't guarantee someone else will query for it that way (i.e., "un-reconcile" vs "unreconcile", "un-post" vs "unpost", etc.). I've just now had the time to start digging into how to improve the search results when someone uses the form that we don't use in the headers, the content, the meta data, the Glossary, etc., etc. I've done some tests and it seems like if the user types the word the way we don't have it, it significantly narrows down their results. Or at best, it's just not as accurate.

Is there a way to ask Flare to associate hyphenated words with their non-hyphenated counterpart? So that when a user searches, the search engine identifies what they're looking for?
Psider
Propellus Maximus
Posts: 810
Joined: Wed Jul 06, 2011 1:32 am

Re: Hyphenated words in search results

Post by Psider »

Perhaps try adding synonyms. I'm not sure how it will handle the hyphens, but that would be my first stop.
https://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare20 ... nonyms.htm
sds
Propeller Head
Posts: 48
Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2018 11:29 am
Location: Tucson

Re: Hyphenated words in search results

Post by sds »

Thanks. Yeah, I've tried synonyms. I had them in there for a long time and it was only recently that I realized they weren't working for hyphenated words :cry:
Feebeegeebee
Sr. Propeller Head
Posts: 213
Joined: Wed Aug 08, 2012 8:38 am
Location: UK

Re: Hyphenated words in search results

Post by Feebeegeebee »

sds wrote:Thanks. Yeah, I've tried synonyms. I had them in there for a long time and it was only recently that I realized they weren't working for hyphenated words :cry:
Unfortunately synonyms don't recognise hyphens, which has been an annoyance for some time.

It won't work across the board, but if you want a specific topic returned when someone enters "unpost" or "un-post" you could use Microcontent on that topic.
Then, you can add "un-post" as an alternative phrase and it'll return the same topic when searched for. Not ideal, but might be useful for specific cases.

Maybe also submit an enhancement request for synonyms to handle hyphens...?
Cheers!
Feebeegeebee
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sds
Propeller Head
Posts: 48
Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2018 11:29 am
Location: Tucson

Re: Hyphenated words in search results

Post by sds »

Micro content is a good idea. In my last project I utilized that. My only issue with micro content is that we have similar terminology for multiple different areas. So "un-post an accounts receivable invoice" and "un-post an accounts payable invoice". In the last project I found ways to make a hierarchy but it's never been perfect. Still, I could probably get clever with the use of micro content as a way to ask the user what they're looking for if the terminology fits two different topics. Thanks!

EDIT: I think I will submit a feature request! As long as it's not something already available, I'm all for submitting feature requests. As someone who works in software myself, it's nice to turn the tables ;p
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