I am implementing a database of names and institutions using MVC hosted on Azure- and need to provide the ability to search for names and institutions in a smart way
I understand I can get some element of fuzzy search for typos etc via the following: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/azure/en-US/0b9f3feb-b084-4758-995f-3d5daabdbc5a/azure-search-ranking?forum=azuresearch
How do I do get the functionality to match what is natural for us but not exactly a typo (don't want to list out all options) e.g. Robert vs Bob; Elizabeth vs Liza; or on institution- IBM vs International Business Machines
Azure Search currently doesn't provide a way to automatically expand search terms to equivalent terms because they are highly application specific. You can however define a set of synonyms specific to your application in Azure Search. In your example, Robert and Bob, and Elizabeth and Liz would be synonyms. The feature is currently in private preview and will be publicly available soon. Please contact me if you are interested. (I will leave my contact in a comment, as answer with an email tends to get filtered out)
Nate