Thesaurus, a way of doing smart searches and getting meaningful results

Wyzbook flash interface has a feature called “Smart Search”. Without going to deep into technical details let me show you an example so that you can see what is this feature useful for.

Go to the search box and type systematic as in the screenshot below. Hit enter and observe how many results you’ve got.

Wyzbook-systematic-search

Now, leave the same keyword in the search box, but enable “Smart search” before initiating your search. Hit enter afterwards. You should observe that the results are now more diversified.

How is this helpful? Imagine this: you might be searching for some information but you are not using (various reasons: they’re not in your mind at that point of time) the proper search terms. What you need is out there in the book, but you simply can’t get it because you are not searching with the right keywords.

The smart search feature tries to find equivalent keywords to your search term and help you find what you are looking for. Ain’t that cute? How does this work? The search engine makes use of a thesaurus: a list of synonyms, often including related terms. Right now our thesaurus is extremely small, we created it just for testing purposes.

Since it would be pretty daunting to develop our thesaurus to a size that would really make it useful to searches, I am thinking of a web service that can get similar words to the search term dynamically. The thesaurus web service would need the following features:

Can you recommend or build such a service?

Later edit: When I wrote Wyzbook, I was thinking about a web service which could be easily queried in order to return synonyms. I didn’t find one then.

I recently found a cool webservice that one can use to get synonyms. I am referring to the Big Huge Thesaurus http://words.bighugelabs.com/api.php

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August 3, 2007 | Filed Under Thesaurus 

Comments

2 Responses to “Thesaurus, a way of doing smart searches and getting meaningful results”

  1. Deyan Ginev on April 12th, 2009 3:54 pm

    From what I understand, it sounds like you need the synonym sets for a given word which you will then incorporate in you search in some smart way.

    If this is indeed what you need, take a look at WordNet (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/). It gives a huge dictionary with established synonym sets, word senses and much more. It’s free, easy to use from the command line and most mainstream programming languages already offer some native API library.

    Cheers,
    Deyan

  2. octav on April 12th, 2009 8:14 pm

    Deyan, thanks for your suggestion. True, it’s synonyms sets that I need for a given word.

    When I wrote Wyzbook, I was thinking about a web service which could be easily queried in order to return synonyms. I didn’t find one then.

    I recently found a cool webservice that one can use to get synonyms. I am referring to the Big Huge Thesaurus http://words.bighugelabs.com/api.php

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