On 4/10/07 10:06 AM, "J. Delgado" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Progressive relaxation, at least as Oracle has defined it, is a > flexible, developer defined series of queries that are efficiently > executed in progression and in one trip to the engine, until minimum > of hits required is satisfied. It is not a self adapting precision > scheme nor it tries to guess what is the best match. Correct. Search engines are all about the best match. Why would you show anything else? This is an RDBMS flavored approach, not an approach that considers natural language text. Sets of matches, not a ranked list. It fails as soon as one of the sets gets too big, like when someone searches for "laserjet" at HP.com. That happens a lot. It assumes that all keywords are the same, something that Gerry Salton figured out was false thirty years ago. That is why we use tf.idf instead of sets of matches. I see a lot of design without any talk about what problem they are solving. What queries don't work? How do we make those better? Let's work from real logs and real data. Oracle's hack doesn't solve any problem I've see in real query logs. I'm doing e-commerce search, and our current engine does pretty much what Oracle is offering. The results are not good, and we are replacing it with Solr and DisMax. My off-line relevance testing shows a big improvement. wunder -- Search Guru, Netflix
