SEO:Concept-based searching
Monday, June 30th, 2008Excite used to be the best-known general-purpose search engine site on the Web that relies on concept-based searching. It is now effectively extinct.
Unlike keyword search systems, concept-based search systems try to determine what you mean, not just what you say. In the best circumstances, a concept-based search returns hits on documents that are “about” the subject/theme you’re exploring, even if the words in the document don’t precisely match the words you enter into the query.
How did this method work? There are various methods of building clustering systems, some of which are highly complex, relying on sophisticated linguistic and artificial intelligence theory that we won’t even attempt to go into here. Excite used to a numerical approach. Excite’s software determines meaning by calculating the frequency with which certain important words appear. When several words or phrases that are tagged to signal a particular concept appear close to each other in a text, the search engine concludes, by statistical analysis, that the piece is “about” a certain subject.
For example, the word heart, when used in the medical/health context, would be likely to appear with such words as coronary, artery, lung, stroke, cholesterol, pump, blood, attack, and arteriosclerosis. If the word heart appears in a document with others words such as flowers, candy, love, passion, and valentine, a very different context is established, and a concept-oriented search engine returns hits on the subject of romance.