Findability

When searching for documents that you have created, you are likely to get good results because your vocabularly is well known to you; you are likely to be able to create a search query using words or phrases that you are familier with, and that you would have used in your documents and e-mails.

However when searching on the Web or a company network, your search vocabulary will most likely not match that of all the authors of the Web pages or documents you are searching, especially if you are not searching in your native language. This is a well known problem, and when writing for the Web or company Intranet it is important to write with findability in mind (see Use Old Words When Writing for Findability by Jakob Nielsen).

When searching on your company network, it is unlikely that many documents will have been created with findability in mind; there may be 'internal vocabulary', specialised terminology, acronyms or abbreviations that are unique to your organisation, profession, or industry sector; there may be slang in internal e-mails, 'politically correct' phrases in formal reports, words and phrases which are the 'flavour of the month' from your marketing or sales people, and sprinkled in will be a few misspellings! How do you improve your search methods to take this into account?

A method which you may not have come across before in simple search tools is the User Thesaurus; this allows you to create synonym groups of words or phrases (also known as 'synonym rings'). For example, if you define a synonym group to include the words improve, ameliorate, amend, better, and help, a search for 'improve' will also find any of the other words in the group.

Remember, the built in WordNet Thesaurus will allow you to automatically find many synonyms and related words, but word usage changes over time. You can add current terms or add equivalent words in other languages in the User Thesaurus, for example if you select Related Words in dtSearch Desktop or Network, a search on analgesic will also find aspirin, acetylsalicylic acid, painkiller and many other alternatives, but you could perhaps add 'anadin' or other brand names or the common phrase 'headache tablet' to improve your search results.

The User Thesaurus can also be used to expand words in your search query to include grammatical variants. Stemming will take care of the majority of these, but short words and English irregular verbs (e.g. ring, rang, rung; sing, sang, sung, etc.) are well known to be difficult to handle with most stemming methods.

The User Thesaurus Plus add-on product includes sample thesaurus files, including English irregular verbs and other sample files to improve your search recall.

If your company uses MicroSoft's SharePoint Search, the Kenza - SharePoint Thesaurus Editor is the easy-to-use synonym creation solution.