Starting with the Bronze package, FusionBot enables you to setup a custom synonyms list for defining "groups" of words that should be treated as equivalent to one another when searched. In this way, visitors are not dependent on typing the exact search term or phrase that is present on your page in order to retrieve the information they are looking for.

For instance, you may have a page that contains pricing for products on your site. In reviewing your FusionBot search activity reports, you notice that visitors are looking for the word "cost", "fee", or "amount", when searching, which may not return your pricing page as part of the results set.

With the FusionBot synonyms feature, you can create a synonyms group for all of these words:

price,cost,fee,amount

So that your visitor will find your pricing page regardless of which word they use, since, based on this synonym group, FusionBot will treat all of the words as equivalent to each other when found on a page.

The synonyms feature is also valuable for instances where on some pages you may only use a word or phrase's acronym, where on other pages you may only use the word or phrase itself, but not the acronym. However, you would like for ALL pages to be returned, both those with the acronym only AND those with the word or phrase only. By specifying the word/phrase and acronym as synonyms of one another, you can guarantee that ALL pages will be returned, regardless of which search term the visitor submits:

AHA,American+Heart+Association

When setting up your synonyms groups, each word or phrase that is part of the same synonym group MUST be on the same line and delimited by a comma, and when including a multi-keyword synonym (phrase) as part of the synonym group, each keyword within the phrase MUST be separate by a plus sign (+), similar to the following:

price,cost,gross+amount,fee

Also note, if you have Word Stemming enabled for your account, your synonyms will be stemmed as well, preventing you from having to enter multiple synonyms, i.e.:

jog,run,running

The above would be repetitive, since, as mentioned above, the synonym entry 'running', would be stemmed to 'run', which would result in a duplicate entry, since 'run' is already present in your list.

For multi-keyword (phrased) synonyms, only the last word of the phrase becomes stemmed:

SAN,storage+area+networks,storage+area+networking

The above entry would contain an unnecessary duplicate, since the stem of 'networks' would be 'network', and the stem of 'networking' would be 'network', which is identical to the second entry in the group.

Please note, FusionBot is NOT case-sensitive, and as such, there is no need to enter the same synonym in upper, lower, and/or mixed case.

Finally, as referenced above, when you define a group of synonyms that should ALL be treated as equal to one another, you do so by including all equivalent words or phrases on a single line, delimited by commas. By defining a synonym group, it does not matter which keyword within the group a visitor searches for. As long as their keyword is present within the group, all other entries within the group will be treated as synonyms to one another.

There may be times, however, when you want to define a one-way synonym. You can setup a one-way synonym or one-way synonym group using the following syntax:

price=cost,amount,fee

The term(s) to the left of the equal sign define what a visitor MUST search for, in order for any synonyms to apply. Therefore, using this syntax, when a visitor searches for 'price', pages will be returned that have either 'price', 'cost', 'amount', or 'fee'. However, if a visitor searches for 'cost', or 'amount', or 'fee', only pages that have their actual keyword searched will be returned.

You can place multiple keywords to both the left and right of the equal sign, such as:

price,cost=amount,fee

In this example, a search for 'price', will return pages with 'price', 'amount', or 'fee'. A search for 'cost' will return pages with 'cost', 'amount', or 'fee', but a search for 'amount' or 'fee' will only return pages with just 'amount' or just 'fee', depending on which keyword was searched.

To setup your custom synonyms list and for further instructions on the list's syntax, from the 'relevance' tab within your account, select the 'relevance controls' link, followed by the 'Synonyms List' option.