Synonyms no longer working

Thanks for your quick reply. I’ve attached the screenshots to match yours.

What do you think?

No luck unfortunately – see screenshots with just the one synonym.

That doesn’t work either unfortunately. I’m definitely trying to get searches for [prep] to pull up results containing [beginners]

Hmm… Up until a couple of weeks ago the ‘prep’ search would return the Beginners result first, which is what I would expect with the synonym in place. The only reason it’s showing up as the third result now is because I blacklisted most pages on the site.

Another example is high school = secondary school. There is a page called Secondary School, so I would expect that page to return when searching for high school – but it doesn’t return at all (see screenshot). So my suspicion is still that the synonyms aren’t working.

Thanks for your response – I can replicate your test, but the secondary result is second last out of all the other pages on my site. There are other far less relevant responses appearing above. Removing the synonym from the backend does not change the return of the desired page, indicating that synonyms still aren’t working… I’m confused because a couple of weeks ago it was functioning so well! I don’t want to be a pain, but is there anything else to try?

Oh, thanks for your response. Here’s what I’ve checked:

– I’ve bought a lifetime pro subscription so I could check ordering. See screenshot – ordered by relevance desc.
– I’ve flushed cache
– I’ve removed all synonyms except for one for testing purposes

None of the above have seemed to change anything. See the example that I screenshot;

Synonym: prep = beginners

I would then expect that a search for “prep beginners” and “prep” should produce identical results, as per your documentation. Is that a correct expectation? As you can see from the screenshots, when I search for “prep beginners”, it returns results that I would expect (the Beginners page first). But when I search just for “prep” it returns less relevant results. (the reason it is returning similar pages is because I’ve restricted the form to only a couple of pages for testing purposes).

Maybe I’m misunderstanding how the synonyms work – can you correct my logic if I haven’t understood?

In my example, I believe that a search for “Prep” = a search for “Prep Beginners” – as the plugin effectively adds the synonym to the search term. Is that correct?

Thus, searching for “Prep” and “Prep Beginners” should return identical results because they are actually the same search term (with Beginners being added to Prep in the first instance).

I think this is the same logic as your bird and crow example in the documentation:
Searches for “bird” automatically become searches for “bird crow”
->
Searches for “prep” automatically become searches for “prep beginners”

Okay awesome. So if they aren’t returning the same results, this would indicate that synonyms aren’t working for me, correct? Is there anything else I can try?

Sorry, I don’t want to be a pain at all, but there’s a lot of value in this for my client if we can get it working. I’ve also invested quite a bit of time into set-up already 😉

Thanks!