[ic] Improving product search results

Peter peter at pajamian.dhs.org
Mon May 30 01:39:15 EDT 2005


On 05/29/2005 07:48 PM, Grant wrote:
> Has anyone found a way to improve the quality of the results returned
> by a product search?  The Google Mini sounds like a good way to do it:
> 
> http://www.google.com/enterprise/mini/
> 
> but it costs $3000.  This article got me thinking about this:
> 
> http://internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=15072
> 
> It's about an IC site.

IC integrates with the glimpse search engine which will give you 
spelling correction: <http://webglimpse.net/> but not, afaik, synonyms.

You could probably also integrate it with the swishe search engine 
<http://swish-e.org/> though that is not directly supported in IC I 
don't think it would be very difficult to do.  Among the listed features 
of swishe is Word stemming, soundex, metaphone, and double-metaphone 
indexing for "fuzzy" searching which should ceartainly give you a type 
or several types of spelling corrections.  Again, I don't think it does 
synonyms.

If you want synonyms you may be stuck implementing them yourself, unless 
you want to fork over $3000 to google.  The logic should be simple 
enough and pretty much boils down to proper indexing and having a decent 
lookup table (thesaurus), though the CPU power needed to do them might 
be too much.  The logic for fixing spelling errors is widely available 
and you can probably pinch some code from (or even directly interface 
to) aspell for that.

Peter


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