For the search service to provide results on synonyms of a site name, we need to add the synonyms to the ‘Thesaurus’ file.
The Thesaurus files are located in 2 locations on APP server (sp-app1). A total of 4 files need to be changed for the search to function properly.
Here are the file names and their locations.
File Names: tsenu.xml, tsneu.xml
Files Location: c:\program files\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\Data\config
Files Location: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\Data\Office Server\Applications\[GUID of search application]\Config
Open the xml file and you will see an example of how the synonyms should be formatted. Here is an example of a complete file:
<XML>
<thesaurus xmlns=”x-schema:tsSchema.xml”>
<diacritics_sensitive>0</diacritics_sensitive>
<expansion>
<sub>HIPPA</sub>
<sub>HIPAA</sub>
</expansion>
</thesaurus>
</XML>
If you want to add to this file, you start a new <expansion> tag and put all the synonyms for a particular term in <sub> tag. An example of the final output will be:
<XML>
<thesaurus xmlns=”x-schema:tsSchema.xml”>
<diacritics_sensitive>0</diacritics_sensitive>
<expansion>
<sub>HIPPA</sub>
<sub>HIPAA</sub>
</expansion>
<expansion>
<sub>Speed</sub>
<sub>Acceleration</sub>
</expansion>
</thesaurus>
</XML>
Once this is done, you need to restart “Sharepoint Search Service”. This can be done at windows services level. Open a ‘Run’ prompt, type ‘services.msc’ without quotes. Once the console opens find the “Sharepoint Search Service” and click on restart. You should be able to search for synonyms right away.
