A user-tunable approach to marketplace search
Nish Parikh, Neel Sundaresan · 2011
The notion of relevance is key to the performance of search engines as they interpret the user queries and respond with matching results. Online search engines have used other features beyond pure IR features to return relevant matching documents. However, over-emphasis on relevance could lead to redundancy in search results. In document search, diversity is simply the variety of documents that span the result set. In an online marketplace the diversity in the result set is represented by items for sale by different sellers at different prices with different sales options. For such a marketplace, in order to minimize query abandonment and the risk of dissatisfaction to the average user, several factors like diversity, trust and value need to be taken into account. Previous work in this field [4] has shown an impossibility result that there exists no such function that can optimize for all these factors. Since these factors and the measures associated with the factors could be subjective we take an approach of giving the control back to the user.