[Developers] Looking for Beyonce

[Tim Sturge]

This is not the first time I've heard this said. I'm wondering whether or not this should be a supported mode. The problem I have is that users don't expect this except when they do :-)

For example "Destiny's Child" is an excellent result for Beyonce; sometimes tracks were written by the group, not by Beyonce as an individual. Likewise "U2" is a good result for "Larry Mullen" for much the same reason.

Problem is that it is hard to draw the line when these things are important and when they are not.

Tim


----- Original Message -----
From: "Arthur van Hoff" <AVH at zing.net>
To: "For discussions about MQL, Freebase API and apps built on Freebase" <developers at freebase.com>
Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2007 1:41:10 PM (GMT-0800) America/Los_Angeles
Subject: Re: [Developers] Looking for Beyonce

Hi Tim,

I'm not sure this is the behavior that our users are going to expect. They are going to wonder why I am showing Swizz Beatz when you type in Beyonce, and I need to display a reason why there is a match. For now I can match the search string against the aliases, and discard the results that don't have a match. Thanks.
 	

-----Original Message-----
From: developers-bounces at freebase.com [mailto:developers-bounces at freebase.com] On Behalf Of Tim Sturge
Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2007 1:21 PM
To: For discussions about MQL,Freebase API and apps built on Freebase
Cc: For discussions about MQL,Freebase API and apps built on Freebase
Subject: Re: [Developers] Looking for Beyonce

Hi Arthur,

The order is determined by the overall rank of the item (in a search engine fashion.) The word placement isn't important (although phrases do rank higher just like in search engines.) So I assume that more people care about 50 cent's duo than Stevie Wonder's. 

The search engine tries to be fairly comprehensive in its results. This is because there are many cases where we don't have names and aliases that are widely known. For example there is no alias "AAA" for the "American Automobile Association". So restricting to names and aliases would produce an inferior set of matches. 

Conversely though the lower ranked results are often not very meaningful; they have some related "context" but aren't exactly related to the search string. Restricting to the top 10 results is the way we've dealt with this; all of the first 10 results for Beyonce seem to be related to her.

I hope this is helpful,

Tim




----- Original Message -----
From: "Arthur van Hoff" <AVH at zing.net>
To: "For discussions about MQL, Freebase API and apps built on Freebase" <developers at freebase.com>
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2007 11:45:27 PM (GMT-0800) America/Los_Angeles
Subject: Re: [Developers] Looking for Beyonce

Hi Chris,

I switched over to using the search API, which works, but I have some questions.

When you search for Beyonce the results contains "50 Cent vs. Beyoncé" before "Beyoncé & Stevie Wonder". What determines the order? It would seem that the results where Beyoncé is closer to the start of a string should be listed first.

When you search for Beyonce you find "Swizz Beatz" (huh?). Perhaps it is because the original Wikipedia entry contains a reference to Beyonce? Is there some way to restrict the results only to topics that actually contain the search string in the name or in an alias?

Is it possible to get results without escaped HTML characters?
	
Thanks for your help.

-----Original Message-----
From: developers-bounces at freebase.com [mailto:developers-bounces at freebase.com] On Behalf Of Christopher R. Maden
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 10:04 PM
To: developers at freebase.com
Subject: Re: [Developers] Looking for Beyonce

Arthur van Hoff wrote:
> How do I query for an artist either by name or by alias? Section
> 3.2.20 of the documentation mentions that there is no way to express
> an OR relationship.  I need to match against either an alias or a
> name because some bands don't have their name listed as an alias.

You may want to try using the search API instead of MQL for these kinds
of queries.

If you want or need to use direct MQL, you will need to execute two 
queries.  You can send them in one envelope or two, depending on your 
requirements; i.e., you could look for the name first, and if it fails, 
then send back a query for the alias, or you could send two queries, one 
for the name and one for the alias, and then see what you found.

This is kind of what the search API is optimized for.  The best examples 
of how to use it are in the freebase-suggest wiki: <URL: 
http://code.google.com/p/freebase-suggest/wiki/FreebaseAPISearch >.

~Chris
-- 
Christopher R. Maden
Data Architect
Metaweb Technologies, Inc.
<URL: http://www.metaweb.com/ >
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