Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

October 8, 2013

Search-Aware Product Recommendation in Solr (Users vs. Experts?)

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Recommendation,Searching,Solr — Patrick Durusau @ 10:43 am

Search-Aware Product Recommendation in Solr by John Berryman.

From the post:

Building upon earlier work with semantic search, OpenSource Connections is excited to unveil exciting new possibilities with Solr-based product recommendation. With this technology, it is now possible to serve user-specific, search-aware product recommendations directly from Solr.

In this post, we will review a simple Search-Aware Recommendation using an online grocery service as an example of e-commerce product recommendation. In this example I have built up a basic keyword search over the product catalog. We’ve also added two fields to Solr: purchasedByTheseUsers and recommendToTheseUsers. Both fields contain lists of userIds. Recall that each document in the index corresponds to a product. Thus the purchasedByTheseUsers field literally lists all of the users who have purchased said product. The next field, recommendToTheseUsers, is the special sauce. This field lists all users who might want to purchase the corresponding product. We have extracted this field using a process called collaborative filtering, which is described in my previous post, Semantic Search With Solr And Python Numpy. With collaborative filtering, we make product recommendation by mathematically identifying similar users (based on products purchased) and then providing recommendations based upon the items that these users have purchased.

Now that the background has been established, let’s look at the results. Here we search for 3 different products using two different, randomly-selected users who we will refer to as Wendy and Dave. For each product: We first perform a raw search to gather a base understanding about how the search performs against user queries. We then search for the intersection of these search results and the products recommended to Wendy. Finally we also search for the intersection of these search results and the products recommended to Dave.

BTW, don’t miss the invitation to be an alpha tester for Solr Search-Aware Product Recommendation at the end of John’s post.

Reading John’s post it occurred to me that an alternative to mining other users’ choices, you could have an expert develop the recommendations.

Much like we use experts to develop library classification systems.

But we don’t, do we?

Isn’t that interesting?

I suspect we don’t use experts for product recommendations because we know that shopping choices depends on a similarity between consumers

We may not know what the precise nature of the similarity may be, but it is sufficient that we can establish its existence in the aggregate and sell more products based upon it.

Shouldn’t the same be true for finding information or data?

If similar (in some possibly unknown way) consumers of information find information in similar ways, why don’t we organize information based on similar patterns of finding?

How an “expert” finds information may be more “precise” or “accurate,” but if a user doesn’t follow that path, the user doesn’t find the information.

A great path that doesn’t help users find information is like having a great road with sidewalks, a bike path, cross-walks, good signage, that goes no where.

How do you incorporate user paths in your topic map application?

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