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WEB SEARCH: DEMONSTRATION
Relona's demo is based on Yahoo's search API. Comparison studies indicate that when Yahoo is enhanced with Relona's technology, Yahoo's search results become as accurate as Google.
Intent-Analysis
Relona’s algorithms analyze the user’s search query to discover the search-intent. The data from this analysis is stored in an Intent-Map. The Intent-Map is a data-structure that specifies how the different keywords in the query should be selectively emphasized and selectively de-emphasized for best results. In addition, the Intent-Map also specifies how words should be grouped in multi-word concepts.
Query Modifications
Though the best way to use the intent-map is to integrate it directly into a search-engine, Yahoo's publicly available API does not support such integration. Therefore Relona's system is implemented as a query modifier. Relona's algorithm analyzes the user's search query and computes how to modify the user's search query. When this modified search query is run on Yahoo's engine, it produces superior results. The process for query-modification is shown below:
Relona modifies a user's query through the following steps:
1. Analyze the user's query using intent-analysis algorithms and compute an intent-map
2. Use the intent-map to generate a set of alternative modifications of the user's query
3. Choose the best alternative query using a heuristic
In other words, the user's query is processed by Relona's algorithm and an intent-map is generated. The intent-map is used to create a set of alternative queries. Next, a heuristic is run to automatically select the single best alternative query. The output of the heuristic is a single modified query. Yahoo-Search produces more accurate results for the modified-query than for the original user-query.
The following diagram illustrates how Relona's query-modification system works. Each of the three steps have been numbered 1, 2 and 3. We will refer to these steps by their numbers later in this discussion.
Demonstrations
We have created two demonstration systems to illustrate how our technology works.
One is a demo of steps 1 and 2 in the diagram above and is available online.
The other demo is a complete implementation of steps 1, 2 and 3. This demo is available as a desktop application.
1. Online Demo of Intent-Analysis & Alternative Queries
The online demo helps illustrate the benefits of the intent-analysis algorithm. As shown in the diagram below, the demo implements steps 1 and 2 of Relona's query modification technology. The intent-analysis algorithm creates a data-structure called intent-map that has information about how keywords should be emphasized or grouped to get better search-results. Using this information, a set of alternative queries are generated (in step 2 - see diagram below). These alternative queries are a representation of the information in the intent-map. The online demo displays these alternative queries to the user.
As shown by the yellow highlight in the diagram above, this is a partial demo of our technology. It covers only steps 1 and 2. The heuristic selector in step 3 that selects the best alternative query is not part of this demo.
Details about our complete demo - which includes step 3 - are given below.
2. Complete Demo Including the Heuristic Selector:
A system that illustrates Relona's entire query-modification technology (including steps 1, 2 and 3 - see the green highlight in the diagram below) has been implemented as a desktop application. When a user's search-query is given as input, this system automatically computes a single modified query. Unlike the online demo, this desktop application does not display alternative queries because the heuristic algorithm of step 3 is able to resolve the multiple alternatives to a single modified query.
An example output file from our heuristic demo illustrates how queries are rewritten to produce better results. As explained earlier, a search-engine merely has to replace the user's query with the modified-query computed by this system.
Access to the complete demo is available upon request by sending email to info[at]relona[dot]com.
FURTHER READING
Comparison Studies: Blinded 3-way comparison of Yahoo, Google, and Relona indicates that when Yahoo is enhanced with Relona's algorithm its search results are more accurate than Google.
FAQ: Answers to common questions about Relona Web Search. |
WEB SEARCH