Friday, 4 January 2013

search for the carrot

I guess all of you are familiar with the list that is produced by your browser when you search for a term such as "alveolar tap":
The advantage of such a list is the speed with which it can be displayed on your screen. 

But there are alternatives. One of them is called clustering. By this method the results can be displayed in a more structured manner. Documents that contain the search term are assigned to categories/topics. To be able to do this a search engine has to classify documents by analysing its contents statistically and linguistically. The clustering quality naturally rests on the quality of the classification algorithm.

Here is what you get when you search for "alveolar tap" using a search engine that relies on this clustering technique:
Give it a try and go to carrotsearch.

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