Parametric Search of E-Commerce Data

J. Shafer, R. Agrawal : WWW-9

Conventional Wisdom

• User enters search criteria into HTML form• User’s query is received by web-server and

submitted to a server-side database (usually as SQL)

• Result set is returned to user as an HTML page (or a series of pages)

Search Problem in E-Commerce

• Users often don’t know exactly what they are looking for– Search is a process, not a single operation– An individual query is simply a means to an

end• Too many/few results: try different query• No universal ranking function

Essential Ideas of Eureka

• Incrementally fetch superset of tuples of interest in the client (e.g. all products in the product category of interest)

• User-interface and fast indexing structures for interactive exploration of the cached tuples

•Restriction by example•Ranking•Fuzzy restrictions

Comments

• Used Eureka in several situations with very positive feedback

• Used Eureka on datasets with 100K records with no visible deterioration in performance

• Performance is excellent, even in Java