Almost any person working with search is somehow aware of Synonyms and their importance when optimizing search to improve recall. Therefore, it will be no surprise to say that adding synonyms is one of the most essential methods of introducing domain-specific knowledge into any symbolic-based search engine.

This is the final post in a series of three. If you missed Part 1 and Part 2, please head over and read them first as this post will build on the work from our sample analytics application.

Do you know Querqy? If you have a Lucene-based search engine in place – which will be Solr or Elasticsearch in most cases – you should have heard about Querqy Sounds like: “Quirky”! It’s a powerful query parsing and enhancement engine. It uses different rewriters to add context to the incoming search queries. The most basic rewriter uses a manual rule configuration to add Synonyms, Filters, and Up- and Down-Boostings for the final Lucene Query. More rewriters handle decomposition, number unit normalization, and replacements.

Mushrooms are some of the oldest and compared to us humans – simplest, organisms. What we call a mushroom is actually just a fruit body of a complex underground network of fungal threads called mycelium – that’s where all the exciting stuff happens. Not only does mycelium provide the nutrients, but it also serves as a communication network.

In my last article, we learned how to create and run a Rally-Track. In this article, we’ll take a deeper and look at a real-world Rally example. I’ve chosen to use OCSS, where we can easily have more than 50.000 documents in our index and about 100.000 operations per day. So let’s begin by identifying which challenges make sense for our sample project.