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August 29, 2003
Building a Search Engine
Mike Steckl pointed out Peter van Dijck's excellent article on how to build a search engine that supports "Best Bets" and a basic controlled vocabulary. Even if you don't know database design, please read this, and point the programmers you work with to it. Peter covers the nuts and bolts, with a bare minimum of information retrieval theory (though he slips in some mentions of the user and business benefits as well).
I was very lucky to work with an enthusiastic and capable programmer at defcom on a very complex search UI. Databases that can handle searches on synonyms, controlled vocabularies, and facets aren't really that complex to build; notice how simple the tables in Peter's example are. In fact, a basic Best Bets feature is so simple, it's amazing that more sites don't offer it.
Posted by Andrew at August 29, 2003 02:35 PM