Allow for synonym searching

The profile feature request is a duplicate.
http://drupal.org/node/28325

I'm therefore renaming to add a synonym feature. The site administrator would presumably maintain a list of synonyms for words that would either get indexed during the analysis phase or added into the search query (couch OR sofa).

This seems like something to do in a contributed module rather than in the core of the search module.

It could easily be done via the hook_search_preprocess() API, where the module would maintain the synonym list, and any time you search/index you would put synonyms into the search index.