Overview of commercial and free thesauri

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Spicy Vocabulary

Frank Hofmann

A deft use of language can give a text the perfect finish. Those who wish to steer clear of commercial thesauri can find world-class free software alternatives.

A simple search for GPS apps for your smartphone these days can turn up results covering everything from baseball players to Moroccan cuisine. Often, Internet search results only make sense when you add terms to the search itself.

The reason lies in the analysis of the language, which is integrated into the search engine's utilization process. This analysis looks at the relationships between the words based on various criteria, which are then used to refine the results. Computers also appear to understand what you are looking for by providing you with exact and varied results even if typos are present within your search terms.

Although the user interface (e.g., an input screen) often appears quite mundane, the process behind these searches has little in common with a simple phrase or keyword search [1]. In the past, a query didn't find files or documents unless the correctly chosen (and correctly spelled) search terms were used.

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