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Dictionary

The Dictionary can enrich your search by establishing synonyms and alternate spelling connections between queries.

  • When multiple terms with the same meaning are mentioned on your site for some reasons, and you'd like to show them all in one result set when one of them is searched for, you may want to set up synonyms for them.
    Choose Synonyms after clicking the 'Add synonym set' button and add one synonym per line. When you're done, click on the "Create entry" button to save the connection.
    Synonyms are bidirectional: every page mentioning tee will also be found for t-shirt .
  • If, while skimming through your Dashboard Analytics, you notice that some queries return 0 results due to misspelling, it might be a good idea to set up some alternative spellings.
    To do this, choose Alternate Spellings and define a "Correct term", as well as Alternate spelling(s). Click on the "Create entry" button to save the connection.
    Alternate Spellings connections are unidirectional: when you search for tshirt, you will find pages mentioning t-shirt. But when you search for t-shirt specifically, pages only mentioning tshirt will not be found. The alternate spelling is basically rewritten to the correct spelling when performing a search.

If the language used on your website isn't one of the languages natively supported by Site Search 360 (Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish), you can set the project language to English and define your own dictionary for common misspellings, plural forms, alternative spellings, etc.

Important note: after adding dictionary entries, you must fully re-index your site for your changes to take effect.

Synonyms aren’t applied to full-page content​

When Site Search 360 extracts content from a page, we don’t necessarily enrich all extracted text with Dictionary logic.

If a page contains a lot of text, terms that appear further down the page may fall outside the indexed text limit. In that case, synonym or alternate spelling connections may not be applied to those terms — which can lead to searches not returning a page even though a synonym appears somewhere in its content.

The indexed text limit depends on your plan:

  • 2,500 characters — Free Plan
  • 5,000 characters — Columbo Plan
  • 15,000 characters — Holmes Plan
  • 30,000 characters — Batman Plan, Custom Plan, and Trial Plan

If you suspect this is happening, try moving the relevant term closer to the top of the page (within the first characters listed above) and then fully re-index your site.