Search Synonym Manager

The Search Synonym Manager is a tool that allows you to set up your own synonyms for searches on the site. This can be done on an individual level or in bulk using Excel files.

Synonyms are an intensive search process and will only update overnight, once per day to prevent site performance slowdowns.

What Do Search Synonyms do in WebAlliance?

This is a tool meant to enhance the customer's search experience on your site. The usage of this tool is to allow your customers to search for a term across all of your products and have that term provide results for another word. 

A common example would be using a synonym of "foot" for the abbreviation "ft." When a user on your site searches for "foot" with this synonym in place, WebAlliance will also look for any searchable info with "ft" on the site. 

Synonyms work on whole words, they will not activate or be used as part of a partial word. For example, let's suppose we have an item named FT-8675309. Having a word and synonym setup as in our earlier example of "ft" and "foot" would not allow a user to search for foot-8675309.

An actual scenario for the usability of this example would be searching for something like a steel rebar rod with a short description of "1/2 in x 3 ft Rebar." In this scenario, if a user searched "3 foot" they would be able to find this item. 


The table shown above can be interpreted as the "Word" column being the word you'd like to setup synonyms for, and the "Synonym" column as the word(s) that will act as synonyms for the "Word" column. For example, since "half" is a synonym for "1/2" in the image above, searching for "half" will show any results for items with "1/2" in their searchable fields.

Multiple values can be added to the "Synonym" column by using a comma to separate each value. Example: If  "half" is in the "Word" column, then you can assign two synonyms to it by entering "1/2, 0.5" into the "Synonym" column. 

  1.  Add Synonym - Use this button to add individual records.
  2. Export to Excel - Exports the current list of words/synonyms.
  3. Clear Selection - Clears out any rows that have been marked as selected.
  4. Delete Selected Synonyms - Deletes any rows that have been marked as selected.
  5. Reset Words To Default - Removes all words added by users and resets back to the original listing of default words. 
  6. Restore Default Words - Restores any default words that have been removed without removing any records added by the user.
  7. Select Files... - Opens a windows file selection dialog, can also have files dragged onto it.
  8. Download Template - Downloads a basic template empty template for adding your own synonyms.
  9. Import Synonyms From Excel - Imports all synonyms from an uploaded file.