OK I've implemented this before, written academic papers and patents related to this task.
Here are some hints: - you're on the right track with the editorial boosting elevators - http://wiki.apache.org/solr/UserTagDesign - be darn careful about assuming that one click is enough evidence to boost a long 'distance' - first page effects in search will skew the learning badly if you don't compensate. 95% of users never go past the first page of results, 1% go past the second page. So perfectly good results on the second page get permanently locked out - consider forgetting what you learn under some condition In fact this whole area is called 'learning to rank' and is a hot research topic in IR. http://web.mit.edu/shivani/www/Ranking-NIPS-05/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lr4ir-2007/ https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lr4ir-2008/ - Neal Richter On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 2:06 PM, Matthew Runo <mr...@zappos.com> wrote: > Hello folks! > > We've been thinking about ways to improve organic search results for a while > (really, who hasn't?) and I'd like to get some ideas on ways to implement a > feedback system that uses user behavior as input. Basically, it'd work on > the premise that what the user actually clicked on is probably a really good > match for their search, and should be boosted up in the results for that > search. > > For example, if I search for "rain boots", and really love the 10th result > down (and show it by clicking on it), then we'd like to capture this and use > the data to boost up that result //for that search//. We've thought about > using index time boosts for the documents, but that'd boost it regardless of > the search terms, which isn't what we want. We've thought about using the > Elevator handler, but we don't really want to force a product to the top - > we'd prefer it slowly rises over time as more and more people click it from > the same search terms. Another way might be to stuff the keyword into the > document, the more times it's in the document the higher it'd score - but > there's gotta be a better way than that. > > Obviously this can't be done 100% in solr - but if anyone had some clever > ideas about how this might be possible it'd be interesting to hear them. > > Thanks for your time! > > Matthew Runo > Software Engineer, Zappos.com > mr...@zappos.com - 702-943-7833 > >
