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How many of us have posted an idea that turned up on someone
else's first Google search because they used a synonym you didn't
think of in their search phrase? It's happened to me (I actually delete
mine), and I know it's happened to other Bakers because I frequently
find the prior art by searching
under
a different word (often under the
*same* word, but I'm not going to start *that* rant again).
What I would like is a search option that uses an online thesaurus
database to run the search first on your exact phrase, then lists
subsequent pages with results from searches of all the known
synonyms of the words you typed in. It may not get everything, but it'll
get more results, and may just help Bakers like me avoid an MFD or
two.
Search for insect, get bee
http://www.google.c...arch&meta=&aq=f&oq=
Prefix by ~ [vincevincevince, Oct 22 2009]
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Annotation:
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Oh yeah, and they call *me* the autoboner. |
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well no, they call you the "boner", big difference.
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btw, guess what happens when you plug "google synonym search" into google...
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Baked. Prefix the term with ~ (see <link> for example) |
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Not the same thing, Vince. It doesn't separate the search result
pages by synonym. And it doesn't work for a lot of other terms. I
tried it with ~fire, and got only links with the word 'fire', tried
'~liquid' and got nothing but the word 'liquid'. So... not Baked. |
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[21Q], if you do not want to see the original term (only synonym matches) then just subtract the original term, e.g.:
~fire -fire
~liquid -liquid
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Not separating the results is an advantage for multi-word terms as it enables relevance to be calculated into the ranking (e.g. #1 for one synonym may be highly irrelevant, whereas #10 for another may be still a fairly good match... separating them out makes the irrelevant one seem more relevant than the other. |
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Still not the same thing as what I'm proposing. |
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A problem with this idea is that most words have several classes of synonyms. So for example 'fire' can mean: burning, animation & vigor, detonate or throw a weapon, dismiss from responsibility etc.
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To overcome this problem the search engine could provide a 'contextualizing' drop down menu to ask you which synonyms and classes of synonyms are appropriate when you type a word (similar to the query suggestions Google currently provides).
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Alternatively, if you type two words that are synonyms, the search engine would figure out the context and suggest (or automatically populate) more synonyms in that class. |
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Oddly there is no synonym for synonym.
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In the interest of balance, there is no synonym for antonym either.
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Betcha can't guess what the antonym for antonym is? |
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