[Developers] Search Query

Sat Dec 15 17:26:24 UTC 2007

One of the things I would like to see w.r.t. search, If I paste a guid
into a search box, it should select that particular topic. This way, if
I know the exact ID of the topic I'm looking for (because it's open in
another tab) then I won't have to bother trying to figure out exactly
which music track named "Epic" I'm interested in.

Faye Li wrote:
> Hi Arthur,
>
> I hear you loud and clear and I think there's no dispute that relevance 
> logic has a long way to go.
>
> I think part of the issue may be that the search results don't always 
> show why they are selected. Because the Wikipedia article blurb 
> displayed for each topic is static, it isn't immediately observable 
> that, for example, KNBR is a sister station of KSAN-FM. I'm not sure if 
> this will change in the near future though.
>
> Limiting searches to only titles and aliases is something we've tried 
> and didn't like. Taking away relevance takes away the semantic part of 
> the search string and reduces it to lexicon matches, where the string 
> "george bush" better matches a 19th century biblical scholar than the 
> current U.S. president or his father, where "beatles white album" will 
> give you the album of that name by a less-known musician Rodrigo 
> Constanzo before the Beatles album you probably meant (which, 
> incidentally, is not called the "White Album" but "The Beatles"), and 
> where "new york" will give you countless songs and albums of the same 
> name before New York City. Searching for "LA, CA" (Los Angeles, 
> California)? Forget it, because there's no such alias and the topic name 
> is "Los Angeles" in Freebase, and if all relevance does is title/alias 
> matching, if you don't know the name of a topic, you won't find it.
>
> In fact, topic names are given a lot of weight -- than than a word match 
> from the Wikipedia article. That said, Wikipedia articles contain a lot 
> of valuable information. The number of times the phrase "Los Angeles" 
> appears in the article for that city is about 100, and the number of 
> times it appears in the article for the 1980 album of the same name by X 
> is 8. That information helps relevance rank the city topic of "Los 
> Angeles" ahead of the album topic of "Los Angeles" when someone enters 
> that search phrase.
>
> BTW, the newest branch of relevance server is going through the test 
> cycle right now. It boosts exact title matching and yields some winners 
> as well as losers. It should be released soon.
>
> --  Faye
>
> P.S. Metaweb is looking to hire a Key Relevance Engineer to help us with 
> search: http://www.metaweb.com/jobs/relevanceengineer.html
>
>
> Arthur van Hoff wrote:
>   
>> Hi Faye,
>>
>> It would be really nice to be able to turn the relevance off. For
>> example, I would like to be able to search for a name or alias in my
>> application with high relevance, and not get any of the results that are
>> hits from Wikipedia. I find that the Wikipedia generated matches are
>> confusing and often do not improve the search results.
>>
>> In general I think that matches on a name/alias should always be ranked
>> higher than Wikipedia matches.
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: developers-bounces at freebase.com
>> [mailto:developers-bounces at freebase.com] On Behalf Of Faye Li
>> Sent: Friday, December 14, 2007 11:37 AM
>> To: For discussions about MQL,Freebase API and apps built on Freebase
>> Subject: Re: [Developers] Search Query
>>
>> Christopher,
>>
>> Topic name is just one of many things that are considered by search. 
>> Other examples include topic alias and Wikipedia article, if there is 
>> one. This allows users to do queries like "he who must not be named" and
>>
>> get "Lord Voldemort" as the top result.
>>
>> The first topic is the image for the "107.7 The Bone" station, topic 
>> "/topic/en/ksan-fm" is the topic for that station, topic 
>> "/topic/en/knbr" shows up because it's a sister-station of "The Bone", 
>> and the last one in your result, "/topic/en/kfjc" shows up apparently 
>> because it had  competed with "The Bone" as a radio station, with shared
>>
>> personal and a tangled history.
>>
>> -- Faye
>>
>>
>> Christopher Dummy wrote:
>>   
>>     
>>> I'm just wondering how the Search Query determines what to return. I 
>>> know it will do some thing based on the name. Does it also do things 
>>> that are related somehow? Where relatedness might just be similar 
>>> types? The query I'm looking at is:
>>>
>>>
>>>     
>>>       
>> http://www.freebase.com/api/service/search?query=bone&type=/user/cotton/
>> default_domain/broadcast 
>>   
>> <http://www.freebase.com/api/service/search?query=bone&type=/user/cotton
>> /default_domain/broadcast> 
>>   
>>     
>>> There is a radio station called, "107.7 The bone", and it shows up as 
>>> the first query. But there are some other stations that also show up, 
>>> and I cannot find any reference in them to "bone". So it is a little 
>>> surprising that they show up in the search results.
>>>
>>> Anyone have a good idea of why?
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Christopher Cotton
>>> Zing/Dell Engineer
>>> http://zing.net/
>>>
>>>     
>>>       
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>
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