Configuring a Thesauraus for Search

I have just stumbled upon the Thesaurus for SharePoint Search which allows an administrator to configure replacements and synonyms for search queries.  These can be very useful when one or more common terms are used to search for the same thing.  Such as “HR” and “Human Resources”.

Replacements

As an example, by adding the following text to the English thesaurus file, C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\Data\Office Servers\Applications\GUID-query-0\config\tsenu.xml, will replace “HR” with “Human Resources” in the search query:

<replacement>
<pat>HR</pat>
<sub>Human Resources</sub
</replacement>

Expansion sets

Adding the following text to the same configuration file will return results for “Technical Support” and “Customer Support” when searching for “IT Support”

<expansion>
_{Technical Support}
_{Customer Support}
_{IT Support}
</expansion>

Note: a separate thesaurus file exists for each language supported