Administration: Omnidex Indexing

PowerSearch

The following tips are helpful when implementing PowerSearch in applications:

PowerSearch provides a more thorough search of the data, usually by increasing the number of search terms being used. For example, a query that would search for a given name of 'William' can be expanded to include “William, Bill, Billy, Will, Williams, Willie, Willis, Wilson”. Because of this, administrators should expect that a PowerSearch may take more time than a regular search. This is generally not noticeable until the search terms have been expanded by at least ten times.

When creating your own custom synonym lists, it is generally recommended to restrain a search term to ten or less synonyms. This is not a requirement, and long synonym lists are allowed; however, adminstrators should expect an increase in search time as the synonym lists grow in size.

Most synonym lists allow one word to be expanded into multiple words, such as expanding a given name to include its common variations. There are other types of synonyms that can add flexibility to your searches. Here are some examples:
- Credit Scores - Create synonyms of “EXCELLENT”, “GOOD”, “FAIR” and “POOR” to equate to ranges of credit codes, allowing a user to ask for those people with GOOD or EXCELLENT credit.
- Age Brackets - Create synonyms of “BOOMER”, “GENX”, “GENY” and so on to represent age brackets, allowing a user to ask for those people who are Baby Boomers.
- Income Brackets - Create synonyms such as “WEALTHY” and “MIDDLECLASS” to represent income brackets appropriate to a given industry.
- Education Brackets - Create synonyms such as “UNDERGRADUATE” and “POSTGRADUATE” to represent education brackets.

Administrators should be cautious about using multiple options in the same $CONTAINS function as it can have a multiplicative effect on the number of search terms. For example, using SYNONYMS for a given name of “William” produces the search terms, “William, Bill, Billy, Will, Williams, Willie, Willis, Wilson”. Using SYNONYMS and MISSPELLINGS combined produces the search terms of IN “William, Willian, Willia, Williams, Lilliam, Bill, Billi, Billy, Billye, Will, Willy, Willa, Williams, William, Willian, Willie, Willis, Wilson”. This is because the MISSPELLINGS is applied to each of the synonyms.

Administrators should be cautious about the order of the options used in a $CONTAINS function. For example, using options of “SYNONYMS=list, MISSPELLINGS” tells Omnidex to expand the search terms based on the synonym list, and then to search for the misspellings for each of the synonyms. Using options of “MISSPELLINGS, SYNONYMS=list” tells Omnidex to search for the misspellings of each of the synonyms and then search for the synonyms of each misspelling.