Month: August 2017

August 10 2017, 16:56

I am currently working on a large project involving search, SOLR, grocery, and one of the languages is French. In French, there’s a problem with the ambiguity of words: cerise translates to “cherry,” but tomate cerise translates to small tomatoes, so the correct search for cerise should prioritize cherries. Another example: fraise means strawberry, but fromage frais translates to cottage cheese (frais in this context means fresh); thus, searches for fraise should prioritize strawberries, not cottage cheese. Or consider, for example, pomme de terre (potato). Pomme translates to apple. Therefore, searches for pomme should not show potato.

And nowhere, absolutely nowhere, is it written about such problems and what to do with them online. Although, of course, it’s clear what to do. But how many such cases are there? Each case needs to be handled differently.

August 09 2017, 12:50

New article on my hybris blog: search synonyms and enhanced phrase search. There’s a well-known issue in SOLR (and it’s not just with hybris) that multi-word synonyms work very poorly. It still functions somewhat with single-word synonyms, but also comes with its challenges. The blog outlines a solution that helps circumvent these problems and make the search smarter.

https://hybrismart.com/2017/08/09/enhanced-multi-word-synonyms-and-phrase-search/