“antiliako”: how Findora understands greeklish, accents and spelling mistakes
Customers don't type the way your products are listed. See how Findora bridges the gap between what they type and what you sell.
Open the search statistics of any Greek e-shop and you'll see the same pattern: “antiliako” (sunscreen), “sampouan” (shampoo), “kollagono” (collagen), “αντηλιακο παιδικο” (children's sunscreen) without accents, “oftalmikes stagones” (eye drops). Many of these are greeklish, i.e. Greek written in Latin characters. Customers type quickly, on their phones, often with a Latin keyboard. The catalogue, however, is written correctly, in Greek, with accents.
A search that simply looks for identical words returns “No results found”. The customer doesn't try a second time: they close the tab.
The customer types “antiliako”, Findora understands “αντηλιακό” (sunscreen).
What Findora does
1. Normalisation. Before any comparison, both the query and the catalogue go through the same processing: lowercase, no accents or diaereses, final “ς” as “σ”. “Αντηλιακό” and “αντηλιακο” become the same word.
2. Greeklish ↔ Greek. Findora transliterates both sides into the same alphabet. That way “sampouan” meets “σαμπουάν” (shampoo) and “paidiko” meets “παιδικό” (children's). It also works the other way round: an English product name can be found with a Greek search.
3. Tolerance for mistakes. A missing or extra letter doesn't stop the search. When the correction is significant, the customer sees “Did you mean…” instead of an empty page.
4. Synonyms and word stems. Industry-specific dictionaries (pharmacy, cosmetics, electronics, clothing) link “αντηλιακό” with “sunscreen”, “SPF” and “suncare”. You add your own from the portal.
Why it matters
In a test with a real pharmacy catalogue (4,756 products) and six months of real searches, the leading search engines without Greek-language processing solved at most 14 of the 22 hard queries. With Findora's layer, the engine we chose reached 21/22.
Every search without results is a customer who wanted to buy. Findora makes sure it finds something.
Want to see how it would work with your own catalogue? Request a demo.