meilisearch / meilisearch/documentation

Complete synonym documentation

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Dominant language
MDX
Stars
174
Forks
276
Avg merge
2d 1h
Merged PRs (30d)
6

Description

Several synonym behaviors are currently undocumented:

  • Typo tolerance does not apply to synonym lookup: if San Francisco => SF is configured, a misspelled query like San Franciso will not return documents containing SF
  • A large number of synonyms can impact search performance. See Slack conversation (internal link)
  • Synonym matching is limited to queries of 3 words or fewer. For example, the synonym S.W.A.T. => swat is ignored by default because S.W.A.T. is tokenized as 4 separate terms. 👉 Adding S.W.A.T. to the dictionary setting causes it to be treated as a single token, making the synonym work as expected. This is partially covered by an open PR #3579 , but it doesn't mention that the dictionary setting can help in some cases (like for acronyms with punctuation).

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

No target file or test is named. Locate the synonym documentation and review the existing guidance alongside PR #3579; document the three listed behaviors, including the dictionary-setting workaround for punctuated acronyms and the performance caveat, with any Slack details that are publicly usable.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
documentation, search
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
55/100

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