Synonyms in search

When you search on Google, how much thought do you give to what you type in? If you are like us, your searches are probably just a splash of words that first pop up in your mind. Yet, you expect the results to hit exactly what you meant.

Iconfinder
The Iconfinder Blog

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How our search works

Now let’s talk about the search on Iconfinder. When you enter a search term on our site, the search engine tries to match what you’ve typed in with keywords attached to the icons. Great, you would think? Well, in most cases, it is. However, sometimes relevant icons would not show up unless you searched for the exact words attached to them. Let’s say you search for “covid19”, but an icon was labeled with “coronavirus.” This icon wouldn’t show up without information connecting these two words.

We have more than 5 million icons, but we’ve been noticing searches that returned no results — even when we knew we had relevant content. Some people tried to redefine their search term a couple of times until they found the anticipated result. That’s not ideal in today’s world, where we are used to finding content online fast.

Synonyms in action

So we started brainstorming on what we could do to make sure all relevant icons are displayed. We could ask icon designers to add more keywords, but they prefer to create new icons rather than thinking about every possible synonym for the different keywords. This would arguably also be a better use of their time.

Our answer to this was to implement a long and ever-growing list of synonyms that automatically adds additional keywords to icons. Here are some examples:

  • DIY, do it yourself
  • asap, as soon as possible
  • fb, facebook, fbook
  • AI, artificial intelligence
  • NYC, new york city
  • 50, fifty
  • rocket, spaceship, space shuttle

And voila! If you search for “AI”, you will also get icons labeled with the “artificial intelligence” keyword and vice versa. Time saved for icon designers and all the icon-hunters.

We hope you like this small improvement.

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