Algolia does apply typo tolerance to synonyms. This is intentional and helps prevent irrelevant matches.
For example, if you define a synonym for different representations of “four”:
four <> 4 <> IV
If typo tolerance were applied to synonyms, queries such as:
- for
- tour
could incorrectly match records containing "4" or "IV".
While matching "tour" to "four" may make sense due to typo tolerance, extending that logic to "IV" or "4" would return results that are not relevant for this query, reducing the quality of results.
If you want to match on alternative names for a record, a more reliable approach is to include them directly in your records. For example, instead of using synonyms, you could modify:
{
"title": "Computer science area"
}To:
{
"title": [
"Computer science area",
"Computer science field"
]
}This ensures that all variations are indexed explicitly and benefit from standard typo tolerance and ranking behavior.