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