[Businessteam] keyword search vs nano

Message-ID: <6B75EF096AE0BE428B8CEDEA89C5F6327823E2@exchange01.lab49.com> · Tue Jun 12 20:26:28 2001 UTC

I figure you guys are going to run into this question quite frequently:
Why is what nano does superior to regular keyword search, so I'm copying
you on it for future reference.

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Keyword search has its place. It is a fast and utilitarian method to
access specific data, where that data is likely to be concise and
segmented along the semantics of your keywords. Use of boolean operators
to construct more restrictive searches can, in the hands of a skillful
user, be quite effective, but it requires an iterative approach, and a
fairly clear knowledge of what you are looking for. Also, keyword search
is greatly complicated by 'polysemy' - the ability of the same word to
take on different meanings in different contexts, and synonymy - the fact
that different words mean the same thing. For applications such as
contextual commerce and establishment of 'related' links, keyword search
is limiting, time consuming, and difficult.

Full text search, or conceptual search, which is embodied in the nano
approach, uses the entire body text of the article as query stimulus. For
this reason, it is able to infer a considerable amount of context around
the primary keywords in the article. This context goes a long way towards
resolving the polysemous ambiguity of the keywords. For example,
Bush-China defines a different context from bush-topiary. Also, the use of
full-text query is intrinsically appropriate for the establishment of
'related' links - this is where our conceptual matching heuristics come
in. Sure, keyword search on Bush-China may retrieve some good matches.
However, it will not retrieve a highly relevant article on China, Taiwan
and the deployment of US forces in the South China sea. Thus our approach
seeks to solve a particular problem of relevance and related conceptual
interest, which is quite discrete from, and more difficult than, a
standard keyword search problem.

Luke Flemmer
VP Strategic Ventures
nano
phone: (212) 402-7870
www.nano.com <http://www.nano.com/> 