Relevance Ranking for Vertical Search Engines

Foreword

As the information available on the Internet continues to grow, Web searchers increasingly run into a critical but not broadly discussed challenge: finding relevant, rich results for highly targeted and specialized queries.

General Web searching has been with us for a long time, has spawned international powerhouse companies like Yahoo! and Google, and is a staple of everyday life for hundreds of millions of people around the world. It is probable that literally billions of generic searches—for general information, celebrities, sports scores, common products, and other items of interest—are well satisfied by the commonly known major search engines whose names are so familiar as to have become part of the vernacular. But since the Internet ...