Search Engines and Algorithms: Semantic Search - Proximity Search and Fuzzy Search
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Proximity Search
Some search engines support finding words that are a within a specific distance away from the query term. To do a Proximity Search, you will use the tilde, (~) symbol at the end of a phrase. For example to search for greenhouse and carbon within 10 words of each other in a description use the search: greenhouse carbon~10
Fuzzy Search
You may not be familiar with the concept of “Fuzzy Searches.” A Fuzzy Search is a process that locates web pages that are likely to be relevant to a search argument even when the argument does not exactly correspond to the desired information. A Fuzzy Search is done by means of a Fuzzy Matching program, which returns a list of results based on likely relevance even though search argument words and spellings may not exactly match. Exact and highly relevant matches appear near the top of the list. Subjective relevance ratings, usually as percentages, may be given.
A Fuzzy Matching program can operate like a spell checker and spelling-error corrector. For example, if a user types "Misissippi" into Yahoo or Google (both of which use Fuzzy Matching), a list of hits is returned along with the question, “Did you mean Mississippi?” Alternative spellings, and words that sound the same but are spelled differently, are given. A Fuzzy Matching program can compensate for common input typing errors, as well as errors introduced by optical character recognition (OCR) scanning of printed documents.
Fuzzy Matching programs usually return irrelevant hits as well as relevant ones. Superfluous results are likely to occur for terms with multiple meanings, only one of which is the meaning the user intends. If the user has only a vague or general idea of the topic, or does not know exactly what to look for, the ratio of relevant hits to irrelevant hits tends to be low.
Fuzzy Searching is much more powerful than exact searching when used for research and investigation. Fuzzy Searching is especially useful when researching unfamiliar, foreign-language, or sophisticated terms, the proper spellings of which are not widely known. Fuzzy Searching can also be used to locate individuals based on incomplete or partially inaccurate identifying information.
Historically, to perform a Fuzzy Search, you'd have to include all the variations of a word in the search box manually, including singular and plural variants, as well as misspellings.
However, search engines are becoming better at incorporating plurals, or suggesting variants (like Google does when you misspell a word in a search query), and many perform Fuzzy Searches automatically. eBay's search engine, Voyager, automatically includes common plurals and known alternate misspellings of words.
Many variant searches can be found in engines that support Fuzzy Search by including a tilde (~) at the end of the word to include all variations of a particular keyword.
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