Our search demo pages and eSearch Pro – Desktop Search include a synonyms option because it can be beneficial.

There are two types of synonym options: pre-defined and user-defined.

Pre-defined options may use a large thesaurus/database like WordNet or smaller specialized databases to better search different types of data. User-defined databases allow you to add your own domain-specific synonym sets to better match your data.

With synonyms turned on, a search for “child“ might return results containing “minor”, “kid”, “youngster”, or “tiddler”, which can be useful. Technically, this improves search recall. Another way to enhance search recall is to use stemming.