2007-06-08T06:28:02-07:00 Practical Ecommerce info@practicalecommerce.com http://www.practicalecommerce.com/ Copyright 2007 Confluence Publishing DBA Practical Ecommerce http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/494/Critique-Part-Four--Site-Search/#comment3018 2007-06-08T06:28:02-07:00

I would also recommend to anyone who is seeking to buy an off-the-shelf content search engine product (site search engine) to be deployed in your e-commerce website, to request the vendors "Precision" & "Recall" capability of their search engine. They are given in percentages. The higher these numbers , the better the retrieval capability of the search engine. "Precision" is defined in information retrieval as : "The proportion of retrieved and relevant documents to all the documents retrieved". "Recall" is also defined in information retrieval as : "The proportion of relevant documents that are retrieved, out of all relevant documents available" More on how effective a search engine in terms of the measurement of its retrieval capability can be found in the link shown below: "Information Retrieval" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_retrieval It is important that you know these numbers from the vendor, so you can have some understanding of the ability of the...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/494/Critique-Part-Four--Site-Search/#comment3006 2007-06-06T17:01:37-07:00

Google has only integrated Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) technology into their search engine over the last 2 or 3 years perhaps, where LSI had been published and available from literatures since the early 1990s. The adoption of LSI by Google is mentioned in this article: http://www.seobook.com/archives/000657.shtml I don't know how Google is combining its PageRank & LSI , but it is sure that they must be computed separately and somehow combine the Indices of those into one. The input to PageRank is a matrix of links (this document links to other documents and vice versa), while the input to LSI is a matrix of term-by-documents, which clearly the 2 are computed separately and then somehow combined. There are new emerging algorithms that solve this problem which is based on Multi-linear Algebra and I haven't seen yet from literatures if any commercial application has been developed, even Google still doesn't know how, but I am sure that they are working on it. This...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/494/Critique-Part-Four--Site-Search/#comment3000 2007-06-06T04:54:56-07:00

I would highly recommend these algorithms for developers to improve their content search engine. Google algorithm PageRank is link-based where it is different from content-based search such as the followings: #1) "Using Linear Algebra for Intelligent Information Retrieval" http://lsirwww.epfl.ch/courses/dis/2003ws/papers/ut-cs-94-270.pdf #2) "Probabilistic Latent Semantic Indexing" http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/th/papers/Hofmann-SIGIR99.pdf #3) "Algorithms, Initializations, and Convergence for the Nonnegative Matrix Factorization" http://meyer.math.ncsu.edu/Meyer/PS_Files/NMFInitAlgConv.pdf #4) "Interactive Search Grouping - Search result grouping using Independent Component Analysis" http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/pubdb/views/edoc_download.php/825/pdf/imm825.pdf The type of search algorithms described in those papers above are the modern state-of-the-art content search algorithms of today. They are different from the traditional key-word search as they...