Search for synonyms without a thesaurus file

Question

We have a SP 2013 on prem site. I am a site collection admin and have no access to central admin. We have a site with a lot of human resource related content for non-HR managers. One thing they search on is fire an employee or variations of that. The HR folks writing the content never (or almost never) use the word "fire" instead they talk about terminating an employee.

I'm just a SP jockey. I'm not going to get these two folks to agree and won't be able to change our company policies.

So I'm looking for a search solution that allows managers to type fire and to find content with termination.

First I found information about creating a thesaurus and deploying it to our SharePoint Server. But our SharePoint is used by thousands of teams in hundreds of locations and we are not allowed to modify the shared central assets. So that solution won't work.

Next I thought of using a query rule. But it only gives me the opportunity to rerank the items already returned by the original query--which are none. I found this tutorial where he experienced something similar and he had to include the thesaurus to get it all working.

Is there some way that I can take a search term (and maybe use regex to take multiple forms of the word) and transform the search before the results are returned into a different search?

Answer 1

It is sad that your administrators do not see the business value of a well crafted thesaurus. In the past I have created a very simple Thesaurus solution driven by a SharePoint list that updates the farm thesaurus.

Anyway, in your case I would still use a Query Rule. You then have two choices depending on how you want to organize them.

1. Use Advanced Query Text Match - Supply all of your synonyms in a semicolon delimited list. Next choose "Add Result Block" and craft a query that returns the content that you want them to find.
2. Use Query Contains Action Term - Again supply the synonyms but notice that the term that was used can optionally be removed. So if they use "fire" you can swap "terminate", for example.

Another option is to use a term set, but I think that would become unwieldy.