SP 2016: Thesaurus imported, but search cannot find synonyms

Question

Hello,
I successfully imported thesaurus file in Sharepoint 2016-Server with the introduction from microsoft-SP-Site (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/search/create-and-import-a-thesaurus)

I also get the message: "Dictionary imported successfully."

But when I search the synonym my search didn't find a result - also not after a full crawl.

I imported the thesaurus file with Search-Admin.

What can be the mistake? Must I set anything I did not know?

Thanks for answers.

Answer 1

I found the solution - restart the service "SharePoint Server Search 16" helped!

Now the thesaurus works - but not for fields from taxonomy.

I searched for "Unternehmen:unternehmen1" - but when I search for the synonym "Unternehmen:u1" nothing is found.... :-(

Answer 2

Hi @juschra ,

I can reproduce your issue in my end.

This is my thesaurus file imported into SharePoint:

My test list structure:

When I search without using managed property, it works fine:

However, it doesn’t return results when I search by using managed property with synonym:

Per my research, the PowerShell command “Import-SPEnterpriseSearchThesaurus” makes synonyms work only in the query processing as below description:

So this is by design that we couldn't search using "managed property: synonyms" syntax since the synonyms only play a role in query processing and cannot update property values with related properties in the property store database.

I hope this information has been useful, please let me know if you still need assistance.

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