Better synonym handling in Solr by Nolan Lawson.
From the post:
It’s a pretty common scenario when working with a Solr-powered search engine: you have a list of synonyms, and you want user queries to match documents with synonymous terms. Sounds easy, right? Why shouldn’t queries for “dog” also match documents containing “hound” and “pooch”? Or even “Rover” and “canis familiaris”?
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As it turns out, though, Solr doesn’t make synonym expansion as easy as you might like. And there are lots of good ways to shoot yourself in the foot.
Deep review of the handling of synonyms in Solr and a patch to improve its handling of synonyms.
The issue is now SOLR-4381 and is set for SOLR 4.4.
Interesting discussion continues under the SOLR issue.