Synonyms

Synonyms make search forgiving: a shopper who types tv should still find products described as television, and notebook should match laptop. In Viglet Turing ES you author synonyms once, per Semantic Navigation Site and locale, and Turing pushes them into whichever search engine backs the site — Solr, Elasticsearch or the embedded Lucene store — as a query-time rule that takes effect without reindexing.

Manage synonyms from a Semantic Navigation Site: open the site and choose Synonyms from its settings.

Synonym types

Turing supports the five synonym kinds you may know from other engines:

Type	What it does	Example
Regular (multi-way)	A set of fully-equivalent terms — a query for any one matches records containing any other.	tv, television, telly
One-way	An input term expands to alternatives, but not the reverse.	tablet → ipad, galaxy tab
Alternative correction (1 typo)	A term treated as a one-typo variant of the targets.	tshirt ≈ t-shirt
Alternative correction (2 typos)	Same, allowing a two-typo distance.	colour ≈ color
Placeholder	A tokenised slot in record text that matches any value from a set.	<streetnumber> street

Each rule belongs to one locale (synonyms rarely hold across languages) and has an enabled toggle, so you can stage a rule and turn it on when you're ready.

How each engine applies them

Synonyms are a Turing-owned, engine-neutral model; the engine plugin translates each rule into that engine's query-time mechanism:

• Solr — written through the Managed Synonyms resource and applied by a query-time synonym graph filter; the core is reloaded so the change is live with no reindex.
• Elasticsearch — pushed through the Synonyms API as a synonym set that a search-analyzer synonym-graph filter reads, updatable without reindex.
• Lucene (embedded store) — compiled into an in-memory synonym map consulted by the query analyzer.

Engines differ in what they can represent, and Turing is honest about it rather than dropping a rule silently:

• Alternative corrections map to the engine's typo mechanism where one exists, otherwise they degrade to a one-way synonym (a note tells you when).
• Placeholders are not supported on Lucene and are surfaced as unsupported.

The admin page shows a small engine-support banner for the site's engine so you know before you author.

Managing synonyms

1. Create or edit a rule — pick a type and locale, add the equivalent terms (for one-way and correction types you also give the input term), and save.
2. Enable the rules you want live.
3. Push to engine — click Push to engine to apply the site's enabled synonyms to its search backend. Because this is a query-time change, results reflect it immediately with no reindex.

Import from Algolia

Migrating from Algolia? Turing reads your index's synonyms and maps all five Algolia types onto the Turing model in one step. On the Synonyms page choose Import from Algolia, enter your Application ID, an API key with synonym access, the index name and the target locale, and run the import. The rules land in Turing ready to review and push — closing the last gap in the migration path.

AI-assisted suggestions

Because Turing already computes embeddings for your content, it can suggest synonyms you haven't thought of. Click Suggest from search logs: Turing takes your most-searched terms, groups the ones that are semantically close, and adds each group as a disabled candidate rule. Nothing is ever applied automatically — you review the suggestions, keep the good ones, enable them, and push. This turns synonym upkeep from a chore into a suggested-and-approved workflow.

AI suggestions require a default embedding model to be configured (see Embedding models). Without one, the suggestion action simply returns nothing.

API

All actions are available under a Semantic Navigation Site's synonym endpoint (/api/sn/{siteId}/synonym):

Method & path	Purpose
GET /api/sn/{siteId}/synonym	List synonyms (optional ?locale= / ?q= filters)
POST /api/sn/{siteId}/synonym	Create a rule
PUT /api/sn/{siteId}/synonym/{id}	Update a rule
DELETE /api/sn/{siteId}/synonym/{id}	Delete a rule
POST /api/sn/{siteId}/synonym/batch	Bulk create/update
GET /api/sn/{siteId}/synonym/support	Whether the site's engine supports synonyms
POST /api/sn/{siteId}/synonym/apply	Push synonyms into the engine (all locales, or one via ?locale=)
POST /api/sn/{siteId}/synonym/import/algolia	Import an Algolia index's synonyms
POST /api/sn/{siteId}/synonym/mine	Mine candidate synonym sets from the search log (never auto-applied)