Lexical Searching provides a means for you to define word relationships between search terms within Hyperseek, and for bidding.
For example, you might start with the root word "car", and tell ds/X that the following are all synonyms:
car, caar, caars, auto, autos, automobile, automobiles, automobil, dodge, chevy, ford, toyota
Notice that in the above example, we included not only words with same actual meaning (auto, automobile), but also the plurals of those words, as well as words with the same implied meaning, including spelling mistakes, and other things such as brand names and foreign spellings.
The goal of the synonym system, if you enable it, is to account for individuals doing searches at your website for terms that you've not indexed (Hyperseek), terms that no one is bidding on (Jackhammer). It would be a shame for someone from France to visit your site, search for "automobil", and find nothing, when you very likely have the ability to show results matching any of the above words, all of which are highly relevant to that request.
What this does for the your PPC Customers (the people bidding for keywords in your search engine), is to give them an easy way to reach more users with less bids. Your PPC advertisers are able to "opt in" or "opt out" of lexical bidding. If they opt-out, then their listings will only display to searchers who type in words that exactly match the terms that the advertiser has bid on. If they opt-in, then for any words that you have setup synonym relationships for, the advertiser need only bid on one of the words to "get them all".
Returning to our example, if an advertiser has opted in to lexical bidding for one of their listings, and bids on the words "car" and "auto", Hyperseek will only allow him to bid on one of those words (such as "car"). Assuming the advertiser bids $.05 ... if a searcher comes in and searches for "car", the advertisers link shows up with a $.05 bid, just as you would expect. If another searcher comes in and searches for "auto", even though this advertiser didn't bid on the word "auto", his link will still show up with a $.05 bid because the system "knows" that "auto" is the same as "car" because of the way that we defined that relationship using this utility.
NOTE: Hyperseek does not ship with, nor does JJS supply a list of synonyms. You will need to develop these lists and relationships manually. We will be working with our customers that have this system enabled to share their lists into a common database that everyone can jointly grow and develop over time.