Site Search to look for Synonyms/Similar/Misspellings?

Hello everyone - I hope you’re all doing well! I’m wondering if anyone has any ideas/recommendations on a problem I’m trying to solve. I have a client who has a list of companies in a custom module. Each company sells different types of products, but not on the client’s site. On the client’s site, they just have a listing with the company name, logo, and a description. I also created a ‘keywords’ custom field so that the client can add relevant keywords that may not be found in the name and/or description field.

I’m wondering if there is a way to manipulate Treepl’s built-in site search to look for synonyms, similar terms, and maybe even misspellings so that the company will appear if there is a typo or similar term in the search. For example, if someone is looking for a men’s t-shirt and types in one of the following:

men’s tshirt, mens t-shirt, men’s blue tshirt, etc.

Is there a way to have a company that lists a ‘men’s t-shirt’ in their keywords and/or description if they don’t use the exact term or phrase? Does that make sense? If not, is anyone aware of a third-party platform that can be embedded on a Treepl CMS site that can do the same thing - and here’s the catch: without ads? Even if it’s a tool that has a subscription fee, I think my client would be willing to pay the fee to have this functionality embedded on their site to search the companies.

Any recommendations are greatly appreciated!

I’d say that using the embeddable Google Site Search would be the most powerful, although I’ve never used this myself.

This article provides further details and instructions:
How to add a Google Search Bar to your Website? - Expertrec


Also, regarding Treepl’s built-in search, you don’t need a custom field for extra keywords (and this actually won’t work with the regular keyword search field anyway). There is a system field called ‘Site Search Keywords’ where you can add other keywords or variations (comma-separated).

I just realised that Google Site Search has ads (should have known :laughing: ).
However, the site I linked to above has their own paid site search tool which looks like it may achieve most of your goals:

Hello @Adam.Wilson ,

Thank you for responding here! Yes, unfortunately (but not surprisingly) it looks like Google’s search will display ads, which the client told me is a hard ‘no’. I actually sort of inherited this project and it does look like the ‘Keyword’ field is the system ‘Site Search Keywords’ and not a custom field (apologies for the confusion on my part!). I did come across the same Expertrec article that you shared here and gave that some thought - but before I recommend we test out the Expertrec search, I just wanted to make sure that I wasn’t missing out on some obvious solution using the built-in site search Treepl module. While the Site Search Keywords field is a great place to put all potential keywords, I’m just not sure that is scalable enough of a solution for them. They have almost a thousand companies and each company sells a huge variety of products and I just don’t think they have the bandwidth to add every single possible keyword and then also the synonyms and possible misspellings. I’m hoping we can find a solution that offers a site search that has that kind of intelligence built in. Maybe Expertrec is the way to go! I will recommend we give that a try and if they decide to have me play around with it, I’ll report back here and let everyone know how it works in case anyone has a similar situation. I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t a built-in feature that had that sort of search intelligence. I know it’s kind of a big ask, but wanted to check here first to make sure I wasn’t missing the obvious.

Thank you again, I really appreciate you jumping in here and offering your help!

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