Metadata-driven navigation and Synonyms

[Beth Hall]

I'm working on a metadata-driven, non-hierarchical model for intranet pages & architecture, rather than a rigid hierarchical structure. We will be using search to surface the right list of pages on a section Intro page, etc.  To accomplish this we will be building some strong metadata fields for the pages.

In the past life of MS Search and SharePoint, synonym support was provided by 3rd party solutions.  Will the move to Bing solve this issue natively within the Office 365 ecosystem??

If the contributor populates the metadata fields with good, solid tags, without the synonyms--will the synonym functionality be resolved by Bing??

[#2]

What is your planned use of synonyms? If you are adding the highlighted content web part to a page then you would be setting the filter to the default meta data tag. The synonyms are only used when a user enters criteria in a search box.

[#3]

Yup, you’re correct, it Is really about using the tags for 2 purposes.  1) for the nav, as you’ve outlined.  2) for general search results.  The synonyms would come into play for the second use, throughout the intranet “Knowledgebase” of pages.  Where someone might enter a term like ‘auto’ and results should return ‘car’ too.

It is my understanding that pre-Bing as the search tool, this required a 3rd party.

[#4]

Maybe you need to leverage Bing Synonyms API to get appropriate use of synonyms functionality. OOB may not work.

https://www.bing.com/partners/developers

Synonyms API

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[#5]

Also for synonym support have you tried other labels part of term store which lets you enter synonyms and abbreviations for the specific term. 

You can use powershell to work it very effectively in search once if you have all your synonyms listed for a specific term.