google analytics - Is there a way to consolidate event actions from a custom search page?

Question

We operate knowledge widget on our website where users can search for keywords and get knowledge about a wide array of topics. We track these searches in Google Analytics via an event category, which makes the search queries event actions.

Not surprisingly, we face two issues:

1. Users spell the same query in different ways (e.g. typos, singular/plural, with/without article, etc.)
2. Users sometimes formulate search phrases as a single word, and sometimes as a complete or partial sentence (e.g. "item", "what about item", "give me details about item", etc.)

Is there a way to consolidate these very different event actions into one? Right now, we have results like this:

item: 20 searches
itme: 3 searches
about item: 8 searches
the item: 9 searches
items: 12 searches
give me details about item: 1 search
what about item: 1 search
etc.

The goal is to just have:

item: 54 searches

Is there a way (within or separate from GA) to make this happen?

Thanks for your support!

Answer 1

You could use search-and-replace filters to fine-tune the data in your Analytics views (not for historical data): https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034834?hl=en

Anyway, you can filter in the report filter with a regex (i.e item|itme|etc...), to combine all the cases, and read the value of the first row or the total.

You can also export the data to an Excel/Spreadsheet and do this work separately.