Aggregate and conquer: Finding the way in the diverse world of user intents

Опубликовано 15 апреля 2013, 10:26

Andrey Styskin

In our days a search engine result page is not represented by just ten blue links. It usually contains additional special result items, containing news, image or video results. These verticals are intended to satisfy specific user intents, but those needs are actually very diverse and search engines are often not able to provide, for example, a special vertical search engine for some rare user need like "buy a 3-wheel bicycle". In this talk I am going to describe the approach adopted by Yandex. Instead of fixing slots for vertical documents we adopt a more flexible technique based on a probabilistic user model. It allows us to deal with redundant and complimentary verticals in the situations when not all verticals are equally relevant and important for the query. Using our framework we can easily create a new vertical ranking using the existing web document collection. This ranking can then be easily incorporated into the aggregated search results page to maximize the chance of satisfying the user.