Monday, September 25, 2006

Leveraging blogs for search enhancement

Here is an idea - any remarks/suggestions would be welcome.

One of the most important differences between a blog and a simple web site, is that a blog changes all the time. The same person could post 10 different posts on 10 different subjects. Each would be related to that person, yet the only place where they get all connected together is in the blog.

Let's imagine I met someone some time ago, we had a nice little chat, and I gave him my business card. Unfortunately, when he sent his pants to dry-cleaning, he forgot to take out the card (sounds familiar?). He remembers my first name is Ilan, remembers I live in the northern part of Israel, that I work on my thesis and that I like making soups.

Had he remembered my family name is Assayag, things would have been fine - a search for "ilan assayag" on Google brings my blog as one of the first entries. Yet he doesn't remember my family name...

What would be really cool, would be to search for everything you know about the person, and get some kind of aggregated results. So in this case, that person could search for "ilan soup thesis north israel". The search engine would know that search results from blogs should be aggregated in an intelligent manner. A simple solution could be to look at ALL the post from the same blog as if they were ONE single document (although I suppose you could come up with better solutions). If this would be possible, then I'm pretty sure that a search like "ilan soup thesis north israel" would return the correct answer, even though each element of the query can be found on another post within the same blog.

Note: I know that it would be simpler to search for "ilan blog", which, in this case, would be sufficient, although I'm pretty sure that if my name was something else, such a simple query would just not be enough.

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