Vertical search - some feedback
I got some feedback about my recent post about vertical search.
- Discovery and extraction of vertical entities is extremely hard. I agree. However, this is a hard problem in the general context. If it is a random webpage and we are trying to categorize it and extract an entity from it, then this is a fair statement. However, the advantage of vertical search is that we apply the knowledge of a particular vertical. For example, instead of crawling all the web and trying to categorize sections of documents as a job, we seed the crawler with some sites. We tune the extractor to certain pages etc, simplifying the problem space a great deal.
- It’s all about relevance. Someone pointed me to this post from mark pincus of tribe.net. He seems to echo the same thoughts as me, in that, relevance is the key. Also, i didn’t know that walt mossberg wrote about vertical search as well.
