Synonyms, stop words and rules
Your catalog uses your company's words. Buyers use their old supplier's words, their ERP's words, and whatever the fitter on site calls it. A synonym list is the cheapest quality improvement available on a B2B shop, and it is never finished.
Two-way and one-way synonyms
The difference matters more than it sounds, and getting it backwards causes wrong results rather than missing ones.
| Kind | Behaviour | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Two-way | Every term finds every other term | True equivalents: V4A ↔ 1.4571 ↔ A4 ↔ Inox ↔ NIRO |
| One-way | The query term also finds the target; not the reverse | Narrower → broader: Schlauchbinder → Schlauchschelle |
Use two-way when the terms are interchangeable in both directions. Stainless steel designations are the classic case: whichever one a buyer types, they mean the same material.
Use one-way when one term is more specific than the other. Inbusschraube
should find hexagon socket screws; searching for the generic term should not
force every result to be an Inbus. Reversing this is how a shop ends up
returning the whole fastener range for a precise query.
Schraube ↔ Bolzen and
Bolzen ↔ Stift are both two-way, a search for Schraube can return pins.
Keep two-way groups small and genuinely equivalent; use one-way for everything
that is merely related.The five synonym families worth building first
- Trade name against norm name.
V4A/1.4571/A4/Edelstahl.Teflon/PTFE.Torx/TX/Innensechsrund. - Regional and generational names. Schlauchschelle / Schlauchbinder. Muffe / Verbinder. The Innendienst knows these; write them down.
- Abbreviations.
VA,NIRO,EPDM,PN16,DN50. Buyers type abbreviations far more than full names. - English in a German catalog and back.
bearing/Lager,hose clamp/Schlauchschelle. Even in a German-only shop, buyers type English terms for anything they learned from a datasheet. - German compounds.
Sechskantschraube→Schraube,Edelstahlrohr→Rohr. One-way, from compound to head noun. This is the manual fix for the compound problem described in How search works, and there is no automatic one.
Stop words
Stop words are terms the engine ignores in the query. In German catalogs the
useful list is short: für, mit, und, der, die, das, plus filler that
buyers paste from their own systems — Stk, Pos, Artikel.
Be conservative. Two traps:
- Do not stop-list anything that could be part of a code.
A,S,MandTare words in some contexts and article numbers in others. - Do not stop-list units.
mm,bar,VandAlook like noise and are exactly what the buyer meant.
Redirect rules
Some queries should not return a result list at all. They should go somewhere.
| Query | Sends the buyer to | Why |
|---|---|---|
AGB, Zahlungsbedingungen | The terms page | It is not a product |
Datenblatt HK-40 | The machine's documents page | The buyer wants a PDF |
HK-40 | The machine's spare-parts page | The machine case |
Retoure, Reklamation | The returns form | Support query in the search box |
Kontakt, Ansprechpartner | The contact page | Faster than the navigation |
Redirects are underused and cost nothing. Take the top 50 queries from search analytics, find the ones that are not product queries at all, and redirect them. In most B2B shops that is between five and fifteen percent of all searches.
Pin and bury
A curation rule fixes the result list for one specific query: pin a product to a position, bury one out of the top results, or both.
Pin when there is a right answer and relevance will not find it on its own — your own brand's equivalent for a competitor's part number, the current model for a query that names a discontinued one, the standard variant when a query returns fifty lengths of the same screw.
Bury when a product matches technically and is wrong commercially: a discontinued article that still matches its own name, an accessory that outranks the machine it belongs to.
Both are per query, and optionally per channel and per language. Both can carry a validity window, which is how a campaign pin removes itself.
Steps
- Export the last quarter's queries from search analytics, sorted by frequency, with the zero-result ones marked.
- Sit with someone from the Innendienst for an hour. They will recognise half the list on sight and tell you what the buyer meant.
- Enter the equivalences as synonyms — two-way or one-way per the table above — scoped to the right language.
- Turn the non-product queries into redirects.
- Add pins only where you can name the reason.
- Save. Synonym and rule changes apply to new queries without a reindex.
What to check
- Search each new synonym term. It must return the same articles as its equivalent.
- Search the other direction of every one-way rule. It must not be narrowed.
- Re-run the twenty-search test from Search and product discovery and compare the score against last time.
Next
- Autocomplete and suggestions
- Working the zero-results report — where next month's synonyms come from.