Tag synonyms do not work with wildcards for featured search

Question

I noticed that the following URL does not come back with any results (I am on the featured tab):

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/mssql*

However, mssql is a synonym for sql-server, and the following has results.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/sql-server*

The intent is not just to come back with sql-server, but any other mssql variant synonyms (which would be translated into their original tags). I think expanding tag wildcard availability could be an alternate solution for tag hierarchy.

EDIT: Note that https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=mssql* will work, bringing back posts that have references to the original tags and not the synonyms. This just seems to be a bug in certain instances.

Answer 1

With SEDE you could almost mimic this search with the only drawback that the data is only refreshed once a week.

I believe this query shows the possiblities you have to query over tagsynonyms.

-- tagname: enter a tag or a tagsynonym!"wildcards % and _ are allowed"
declare @tagname nvarchar(50) = ##tagname:string##
select top 100 
       q.id as [Post Link]
     , a.id as [Post Link]
from posts q
left outer join posts a on a.parentid = q.id
inner join posttags pt on pt.postid = q.id
inner join tags t on pt.tagid = t.id
left outer join tagsynonyms ts on ts.targettagname = t.tagname
inner join votes v on v.postid = q.id
where (tagname like @tagname
or ts.sourcetagname like @tagname)
and q.closeddate is null
and q.creationdate > '2015-01-01'
and v.votetypeid = 8 -- had a bounty somewhere
-- and q.body like '%getdate%'
-- and a.body like '%getdate%'

I have only added the check for an bounty (==featured) not if there is a current bounty. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Answer 2

Wildcards are, IIRC, allowed in more places than just the end (although that path is optimized); there is no sane way to do wild-card-preserving synonym replacements in the general case. The approach the code takes currently is: check for wildcard expansions first; then synonyms. Because of this, mssql* is simply not expanded to sql-server*. I'm interested: why not just search for sql-server* ?