Archive for February, 2011

Satisfying Needs by Diversifying Topics

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

When retrieving documents for a search query, a simplistic approach that ranks the most relevant documents highest will leave users completely unsatisfied if it incorrectly interprets the query. Incorrect interpretation is an inevitable possibility when dealing with ambiguous queries, which in some experiments were shown to represent over 16% of all queries. To address this we can apply a topic modeling algorithm to the fetched search results and then use a reordering algorithm to ensure we highly rank both relevant documents and topics with a high probability of being in different topics.

Diversification System Diagram

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Search Visualized

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

When Helioid launched in 2008, the field of search startups was peppered with other search and metasearch engines that used various forms of information visualization to facilitate search refinement. From Quintura’s concept maps to KartOO’s Venn-reminiscent topic diagrams to Grokker’s hierarchical topic clusters, there seemed to be a thriving community of entrepreneurs who agreed that the time was nigh to move beyond the traditional strictly linear format of displaying search results.

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