Koko Brown from Kona Brewing Co.

One day we will make it to this brewery. One day. And it will be glorious...

Bottlecap from a tasty Koko Brown

It's been a couple of years since I discovered this brewery. My first beer was the Pipeline Porter, which is a dark beer made with Kona coffee. It's delicious.

The most recent one that I found was Koko Brown, a dark beer made with toasted coconut. It's also delicious.

But, my favorite thing about Kona Brewing Co. are their bottlecaps. Since their beer is brewed in Hawaii, they teach you a Hawaiian word on each of their bottlecaps. It's supposed to make us smarter by drinking their beer, but I think that it's a charming way that they've emphasized the Hawaiian language and culture with their brand.

Nextopia eCommerce Site Search

One of the best parts of my job is getting to work on our site search using Nextopia. We have been using it for about a year and a half. My favorite part is the synonyms, as I work for an online German grocery store located in the US. My goal is for all of our customers to be able to find whatever product they're looking for on our site, whether they're using the English word, German word or a horrible misspelling of either one.

 The German language is particularly tricky because of their fondness for compound words. I'll get into more of that later, but for now, I'll give you a brief introduction to my site search goals.

Let's talk about pears. Nextopia seems to have done a great job with English singular and plural nouns. Sadly, they haven't learned to speak German. This is where I come in.

I searched for pear and pears and got 31 results each time. When I searched for Birne (German for "pear") and Birnen (German for "pears"), I got 1 result and 4 results, respectively.

Since my goal is to populate our searches and to have our customers find as many pear-related products as possible, I head to my trusty Nextopia synonyms list. As of today, it contains 63 pages of synonyms. 

(I apologize for the graininess of these photos. I didn't realize that they would look so bad. I guess there's a first time for everything, though.)

I add my additional synonyms to my handy-dandy synonyms list and voila!

31 results for pear, pears, birne & birnen.

However, success is short-lived, as I realized how many other fruits Mother Nature created and how I now have to add them all to my list....