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Doug McQ

II. What The Others Don't Do (well)

Updated: Aug 15

Alerts for scarce boat parts. I found the generic search engines, e.g. Google et al, as insufficient to meet my needs. What I sought was to have a search engine designed from the "ground up" to provide alerts. This requires more precision - as I was seeking scarce boat parts. As you probably know, the fundamental measures of text search "goodness" are Precision & Recall.


The obvious question is how to improve precision possibly at the expense of recall? A non-exhaustive list follows:

  1. Curate the listing sites to include only those with relevant parts.

  2. Add attributes to listings such as location, source, etc. (where possible)

  3. Allow for complex queries (preferably with simple syntax)

  4. Turn off some “standard” search features such STOP words, synonyms & fuzzy (spelling) because behavior is unknown and could be counter-productive.

  5. Utilize the "standard" search feature of NOT that is not typically enabled in search engines.


NOTE: Image courtesy of Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall



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