Indexing content and synonyms for a search engine.

Question

I am developing a search engine.

I am thinking about taking unique words from , lets say descriptions of products, and making a call to an API to get synonyms and index them also.

"fast and powerful laptop"

would yield the following results...

of course "fast and powerful laptop" AND another field with "accelerated capable netbook"

the synonyms would of course not get displayed to the user, but would only be used to help make the search results more relevant.

What do you think about this idea? Any pitfalls that you see? Does anybody do this?

Answer 1

Words with multiples synonyms would eventually bloat the search. If you have 5 words, each have 10 synomyms, you are now making a search about 50 words.