The current NetQuestion product and its immediate predecessor, SearchManager, incorporate portions of a free text search engine named GURU developed at IBM Research. A free text search engine’s ranking formula is the most crucial component in determining its effectiveness in retrieving good documents in the first few documents in a hit list. Yoëlle Maarak and Mark Wegman developed the GURU ranking formula in 1989. Since then, except for minor bug fixes and algorithmic changes in the C implementation embodied by the GURU research testbed search engine, no work had been done to substantially change the formula.
By: Herb Chong
Published in: RC21057 in 2001
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