[Search-l] Wikia Searching

[Peter Burden]

On 02/02/2008, Aerik Sylvan <aerik at thesylvans.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Feb 2, 2008 12:39 PM, Natanael <natanael.l at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Then I guess that you'll search for "buy ecologic car" or something.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Feb 2, 2008 8:37 PM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:
> >
> > > I will make a more considered response in a minute, but if I were
> shopping
> > > for an ecologic car the site I want is the commercial site.
> > >
> >
>
> Yes, but that would only work of the commercial site was optimized for
> that word, or if the algorithm is smart enough to search on equivalent words
> and phrases.  "Buy" for example.  So, "buy ecologic car" on Google doesn't
> return much use for shopping, but I think the path for some human
> intervention is pretty short:
>
>
>    - human powered "similar words"
>    - search results with algorithmically generated keywords AND tags
>    - and algorithm that matches through the given words, then all
>    similar words (perhaps in an outward spiral from the central term) against
>    the ranked results having those keywords and tagwords.
>
>
> The down side is the tags (and similar words) are subject to spam, but the
> project is going to have to deal with spam no matter what; it's the nature
> of the beast.



One point that comes out of this is that the  pages I want to see most
depend on both
the query I'm making and what I want to do. For example, I have a Toshiba
A60 laptop
(runs Fedora 8 quite nicely), if I want technical information about it,
that's one set of pages,
if I want to buy spares that's a different set of pages. I suspect that
pages of these two
types will have measurable structural differences. The implication of this
example is that
a considerable amount of effort needs to be devoted to the syntactical
analysis of
documents, the rich set of metadata available would then be useful meat for
the
algorithms Aerik has in mind.

Does anybody know what metadata Wikia Search collects about documents?


Aerik
>
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